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Human Rights Abuses (human + right_abuse)
Selected AbstractsRhetoric of Atrocities: The Place of Horrific Human Rights Abuses in Presidential Persuasion EffortsPRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2007ERAN N. BEN-PORATH An analysis of presidential rhetoric in the post-Cold War era finds that in building the case for imminent war, presidents turn to narrative descriptions of specific atrocities, namely rape, torture, and victimization of children. By the same token, presidents wishing to avoid American involvement in war use abstract terms and statistical information concerning human rights crises, but refrain from detailing personalized stories of abuse. This study expands on the theory of savagery as a necessary component in enemy construction and on the literature concerning the changing rhetorical landscape of the post-Cold War era. The analysis finds the rhetoric of atrocities employed and avoided, in similar fashion, by three presidents and across several different settings. The implications are discussed in the article. [source] The Strategic Substitution of United States Foreign AidFOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 2 2010Christopher J. Fariss I present a foreign policy decision-making theory that accounts for why US food aid is used strategically when other more powerful economic aid tools are at the disposal of policymakers. I focus my analysis on US food aid because this aid program provides an excellent case with which to test for the existence of foreign policy substitution. Substitution is an important assumption of many foreign policy theories yet proves to be an allusive empirical phenomenon to observe. Central to this analysis is the identification of legal mechanisms such as the ,,needy people" provision in the US foreign aid legislation that legally restrict certain types of aid; this mechanism, however, does allow for the allocation of certain types of foreign aid, such as food aid, to human rights abusing regimes. Thus, I test if food aid is used as a substitute for human rights abusing states while methodologically accounting for other aid options. The empirical results, estimated with a multinomial logit and Heckman model, demonstrate that countries with high levels of human rights abuse are (i) more likely to receive food aid and (ii) receive greater amounts of food aid even when controlling for other economic aid, the conditioning effect of strategic interests and humanitarian need over the period 1990,2004. [source] Building Peace with Conflict Diamonds?DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2009Development in Sierra Leone, Merging Security ABSTRACT This article examines the merging of security and development agendas in primary commodity sectors, focusing on the case of peace-building reforms in Sierra Leone's diamond sector. Reformers frequently assume that reforming the diamond sector through industrializing alluvial diamond mining will reduce threats to security and development, thereby contributing to peace building. Our findings, however, suggest that the industrialization of alluvial diamond mining that has taken place in Sierra Leone has not reduced threats to security and development, as it has entailed human rights abuses and impoverishment of local communities without consolidating state fiscal revenues and trust in local authorities. This suggests alternative strategies for resource-related peace-building initiatives, which we consider at the end of the article: the decriminalization of informal economic activities; the prioritization of local livelihoods and development needs over central government fiscal priorities and foreign direct investment; and better integration between local economies and industrial resource exploitation. [source] Congress, Kissinger, and the Origins of Human Rights DiplomacyDIPLOMATIC HISTORY, Issue 5 2010Barbara Keys The Congressional "human rights insurgency" of 1973,1977 centered on the holding of public hearings to shame countries engaging in human rights abuses and on legislation cutting off aid and trade to violators. Drawing on recently declassified documents, this article shows that the State Department's thoroughly intransigent response to Congressional human rights legislation, particularly Section 502B, was driven by Kissinger alone, against the advice of his closest advisers. Many State Department officials, usually from a mixture of pragmatism and conviction, argued for cooperation with Congress or for taking the initiative on human rights issues. Kissinger's adamant refusal to cooperate left Congress to implement a reactive, punitive, and unilateral approach that would set the human rights agenda long after the Ford administration left office. [source] The alien tort and the global rule of lawINTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 185 2005Ruti Teitel This paper traces the genealogy of legal developments regarding the expansion of civil jurisdiction for human rights abuses. It endeavours to illuminate the relation between these civil remedy developments in alien tort action and globalisation. It elucidates the dimensions of this development, implied by the transformations in substantive and procedural jurisdiction, as well as in legal personality, and subjectivity, reflecting upon the ways that these normative changes help to constitute global rule of law. It ends by concluding that, whatever their contribution, these transnational remedies are best conceived as complementary to the protections offered by state legal systems. [source] Human Rights Barriers for Displaced Persons in Southern SudanJOURNAL OF NURSING SCHOLARSHIP, Issue 3 2009Carol Pavlish PhD Abstract Purpose: This community-based research explores community perspectives on human rights barriers that women encounter in a postconflict setting of southern Sudan. Methods: An ethnographic design was used to guide data collection in five focus groups with community members and during in-depth interviews with nine key informants. A constant comparison method of data analysis was used. Atlas.ti data management software facilitated the inductive coding and sorting of data. Findings: Participants identified three formal and one set of informal community structures for human rights. Human rights barriers included shifting legal frameworks, doubt about human rights, weak government infrastructure, and poverty. Conclusions: The evolving government infrastructure cannot currently provide adequate human rights protection, especially for women. The nature of living in poverty without development opportunities includes human rights abuses. Good governance, protection, and human development opportunities were emphasized as priority human rights concerns. Human rights framework could serve as a powerful integrator of health and development work with community-based organizations. Clinical Relevance: Results help nurses understand the intersection between health and human rights as well as approaches to advancing rights in a culturally attuned manner. [source] From John McCain to Abu Ghraib: Tortured Bodies and Historical Unaccountability of U.S. EmpireAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2009Christina Schwenkel ABSTRACT John McCain, once considered a "friend" of Vietnam because of his support for normalized relations with the United States, has since lost his standing. Claims to inhumane treatment and torture while a prisoner in the "Hanoi Hilton" have met with angry denials and calls for more attention to the humanitarian care that McCain and others received. Recent U.S. allegations of human rights abuses in Vietnam following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal have further strained relations, as have charges leveled against Vietnamese small-scale producers of dishonest trade practices. Drawing on these exchanges, I examine competing representations of Vietnamese wartime acts that have permeated the "normalization" process. Neoliberal rhetorics aimed at "saving" the Vietnamese economy and its allegedly blemished human rights record are countered by discourses and images that lay claim to a Vietnamese "tradition" of wartime compassion and humanitarianism that also demands U.S. historical accountability for imperial violence and its aftermaths. [Keywords:,neoliberalism, violence, human rights, Vietnam, historical memory] [source] State Obligation, Sovereignty, and Theories of International LawPOLITICS & POLICY, Issue 3 2001Marc G. Pufong Much of what constitutes the business of international relations is undertaken by states in response to their perceived self-interest, and the commitments of states create duties and obligations. This paper assesses critical values that permeate substantive understanding of state duties and obligations. It explores how states traditionally gain community standing and how their choices bind them to existing community norms, even though some are often contested. Assuming a state to be a bona-fide and recognized member of the international community, its self-interested activities, praise-worthy or controversial, create obligation, i.e., a moral and legal duty recognized and actionable by law. In practice, what actually constitutes obligation may not be the same in all situations, or be fulfilled similarly by the same parties, or confer the same rights. It is difficult to establish a uniform reference with which to grapple with state obligation across all situations. This difficulty, however, does not enlighten debates on state responsibilities with regard to the binding force of international law where human rights abuses and other moral/legal violations are concerned. The argument is presented that since community membership, statehood, and state capacity provide the prima-facie basis for state obligation, attempts by rogue states to raise and frame secondary issues of sovereignty and autonomy in order to fence-out noncompliance are invalid States, therefore, are obligated and duty bound by community norms despite subsequent defenses that are raised in an effort to expunge transgressions. [source] From Victim to Victimhood: Truth Commissions and Trials as Rituals of Political Transition and Individual HealingTHE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2003Michael Humphrey The victim has been put at the centre of states' post-atrocity strategies to reform governance, rehabilitate state authority and promote reconciliation. This paper explores the role of the victim in the truth commissions and trials aimed at reconciliation and justice and their experiences of the outcomes. The successor state's focus on recovering victims after mass atrocity ritually inverts the former regime's project of producing them. In both truth commissions and trials the state seeks to manipulate the ,spectacle' of the victim's pain and suffering to publicly project the power of the state for different ends. Whereas the repressive state seeks to deepen the effects of violence as a strategy of rule, the successor state seeks to reverse the social and political effects of violence. These strategies of transitional justice have sought to reverse the effects of exclusion, to reverse the direction of state power from producing victims towards redeeming victims, from injuring to healing. Because of the problems of mass criminality and widespread impunity, truth commissions have become widely adopted in preference to trials as a bureaucratic response to bureaucratic murder. They set about producing a ,democratising truth' through a process of public inquiry located outside the state in the people. On the whole, the process, the public testimony and the witnessing has been better received than the product, the reports and the reparations. By contrast, trials seek to produce a societal consensus based on the recovery of the law. But in both cases the victim is redeemed through the individualising discourse of law or the polarising logic of trials which establishes the guilty and innocent. The truth of atrocity is found in affirming gross human rights abuses in victims, in transacted violence rather than the deeper structures of violence. Thus, victimhood is built on a universalising human rights discourse which overly individualises the origins of atrocity. [source] | ||||||||||