The following is a guest post by Dr. Ryan M. Welch. Dr. Welch is Assistant Professor at the University of Tampa who specializes in human rights institutions and is a former member of the Maricopa County Human Rights Committee. Recently, the State Department created a...
It’s been a big and extremely depressing week for the rights of sexual minorities. Despite some minor victories in Texas and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s veto, anti-gay bills remain on the agenda...
In what I suspect is the least auspicious debut ever made by a Duck guest blogger, six months after being welcomed by the Duck team, I'm finally posting. It turns out that starting a new job,...
The following is a guest post by Joel R. Pruce, a post-doctoral fellow in human rights studies at the University of Dayton. The transnational movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)...
The G20 Summit is over, the protests of last Thursday and Friday have largely died down, as has the media coverage. The City of Pittsburgh reports 83 protesters arrested and nearly $50,000 of property damage within the city, mostly caused by a small number of protesters while the rest marched peacefully in a carnival atmosphere: environmental, anti-militarist and labor activists carrying the banner for social justice non-violently, as permitted by the US Constitution. I've already criticized the protest tactics carried out by a minority of those protesting. Now a word about crowd control...
Yesterday Channel 4 in the UK aired the above video, allegedly recorded on a mobile phone and smuggled out of the country by human rights activists, apparently of Sinhalese soldiers massacring Tamil noncombatants earlier this year. The Sri Lankan government (naturally) argues it is a fabrication. Human Rights Watch's James Ross says "there is no way to tell if the footage is genuine," but argues that the release of the film underscores the need for an "objective" inquiry into atrocities - by both sides - during the conflict. I agree with Human Rights Watch in general - that whatever the...
And now I can say that and support a good cause. This email came to me, through a colleague, from the American Political Science Association today. Members among the Duck readership, please send a brief email to the organization at apsabags@hotmail.com. Dear APSA member,Do you need the annual conference bag? The APSA Labor Project is concerned about the labor conditions of those who make the bags. We are also aware there are environmental and sustainability considerations.APSA does not contract or pay for the bags, one of the annual conference sponsors does; decisions about bag manufacturing...
Great. The "peace deal" in Swat is officially off, and not only will Pakistan whole-heartedly address militants in the region, it will also enforce Sharia law itself, ostensibly to rob the Taliban of public support in the region. What are the assumptions at work here? Assumption A) That Taliban have begun to thrive in the northeast provinces primarily because the civilian population wants sharia law (and not because the Taliban have guns and the state failed to step in and protect communities in the region). Of course, there is something to this - many people prefer order, even brutal order,...
This quarter I'm serving as a guest author on a series of roundtables published on University of Denver's Human Rights and Human Welfare website. The first of these is online this week, a panel discussion of Joel Brinkley's Foreign Affairs piece in this issue, "Cambodia's Curse." My opening paragraph:"Joel Brinkley has written a heartbreaking piece in Foreign Affairs about Cambodian society thirty-five years after Pol Pot. We are presented with anecdote after anecdote about historical trauma, corruption, and poverty. It’s a depressing picture, and an important country case to have on the US’...
Suzanne Katzenstein and Jack Snyder are calling for “human rights pragmatism” in this month’s The National Interest. Their article, "Expediency of the Angels," draws on quantitative human rights literature showing the limits of “naming and shaming” and specifying the conditions under which human rights strategies can be most effective – in particular when activists speak to the power and interests of “spoilers” and construct schemes that enable local communities to “escape perverse incentive traps.”This argument is right on the money. But Katzenstein and Snyder miss an important element in a...
At ISA, I had the pleasure to share a panel with Alison Brysk, whose new book Global Good Samaritans was hot off the presses. I just went through my copy and wanted to offer a few off the cuff reactions.Brysk's key contribution is to focus on positive cases - cases where human rights policies have been enacted by states (primarily middle or weak powers: her case studies include Canada, Sweden, Costa Rica, South Africa, the Netherlands and Japan) and have succeeded . Her key goal is to understand why states sacrifice their national interests (resources and citizens' lives) to help others...
This issue of International Studies Quarterly contains an interesting article about the effect of donors on both the agenda and strategies of human rights NGOs. Here's the abstract:"Focusing on the flow of funding to human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we begin in this article to broach one of the least studied issues pertaining to transnational regimes—namely, their material underpinnings. Through an analysis of the patterns of donor funding to human rights NGOs, we underscore the triangulation between states, donors, and rights NGOs, whereby states have an impact on donor...