How have human rights been entangled with state control of the body? And how have they failed to intervene effectively on tipping points such as the US's endorsement of torture that removes the victim's control over their own body? This book explores the way institutional human rights have glossed over such abuses and been complicit in security politics which see the Muslim body, especially the Muslim woman's body, as an object of control.
Virtuous institutions, such as human rights ones, have been neglected by securitization theory’s focus on the national state apparatus as the key driver of security politics. This book challenges this assumption, showing the ways institutional human rights, deemed the most progressive of rights, have been complicit in rendering the body vulnerable. While the book principally focuses on the treatment of the veiled woman, it also considers wider cases involving torture: the ultimate removal of control over one’s body and biggest transgression of human rights’ supposed foundational commitment to bodily integrity.
An understanding of International Relations exclusively as a sphere plagued by countless known and unknown risks, looming disasters and imminent threats leaves an important aspect of the study of politics unengaged – that of the human herself. The Politics of Bodies at Risk re-engages and re-conceptualizes politics from the point of view of the everyday experiences of human materiality living with risk across geopolitical worlds and state borders. Re-imagining human bodies as productive, singular and embodied materiality removes them from an understanding of “life” in an age of terror as pejorative, dispensable, and burdensome, enabling a novel understanding of politics as an embodiment of human bodies with risk, and not as a sphere of activity aimed primarily at managing, silencing, and normalizing the risky other. Drawing on case studies from several countries and across several disciplines, The Politics of Bodies at Risk investigates the possibility of developing an understanding of the productive possibilities contained in engaging with the human body as a site of a radical interconnectedness between politics, singularity, risk, and security.
According to conventional international relations theory, states or groups make war and, in doing so, kill and injure people that other states are charged with protecting. While it sees the perpetrators of violence as rational actors, it views those who are either protected or killed by this violence as mere bodies: ahistorical humans who breathe, suffer and die but have no particular political agency. In its rationalist variants, IR theory only sees bodies as inert objects. Constructivist theory argues that subjects are formed through social relations, but leaves the bodies of subjects outside of politics, as "brute facts." According to Wilcox, such limited thinking about bodies and violence is not just wrong, but also limits the capacity of IR to theorize the meaning of political violence. By contrast to rationalist and constructivist theory, feminist theory sees subjectivity and the body as inextricably linked. This book argues that IR needs to rethink its approach to bodies as having particular political meaning in their own right. For example, bodies both direct violent acts (violence in drone warfare, for example) and are constituted by practices that manage violence (for example, scrutiny of persons as bodies through biometric technologies and body scanners). The book also argues that violence is more than a strategic action of rational actors (as in rationalist theories) or a destructive violation of community laws and norms (as in liberal and constructivist theories). Because IR theorizes bodies as outside of politics, it cannot see how violence can be understood as a creative force for shaping the limits of how we understand ourselves as political subjects, as well as forming the boundaries of our political communities. By engaging with feminist theories of embodiment and violence, Bodies of Violence provides a more nuanced treatment of the nexus of bodies, subjects and violence than currently exists in the field of international relations.
The mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars—followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights. Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing a sociology of rights from a sociology of the human body. His blending of empirical research with normative analysis constitutes an important step forward for the discipline of sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has traditionally eschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of a discipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the “value neutrality” of positivistic science. Turner’s expanded approach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion.
This book examines the relationship between women, gender and the international security agenda, exploring the meaning of security in terms of discourse and practice, as well as the larger goals and strategies of the global women's movement. Today, many complex global problems are being located within the security logic. From the environment to HIV/AIDS, state and non-state actors have made a practice out of securitizing issues that are not conventionally seen as such. As most prominently demonstrated by the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2001), activists for women's rights have increasingly framed women's rights and gender inequality as security issues in an attempt to gain access to the international security agenda, particularly in the context of the United Nations. This book explores the nature and implications of the use of security language as a political framework for women, tracing and analyzing the organizational dynamics of women's activism in the United Nations system and how women have come to embrace and been impacted by the security framework, globally and locally. The book argues that, from a feminist and human security perspective, efforts to engender the security discourse have had both a broadening and limiting effect, highlighting reasons to be sceptical of securitization as an inherently beneficial strategy. Four cases studies are used to develop the core themes: (1) the campaign to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325; (2) the strategies utilized by those advocating women's issues in the security arena compared to those advocating for children; (3) the organizational development of the UN Development Fund for Women and how it has come to securitize women; and (4) the activity of the UN Peacebuilding Commission and its challenges in gendering its security approach. The work will be of interest to students of critical security, gender studies, international organizations and international relations in general. Natalie Florea Hudson received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Connecticut and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton. She specializes in gender and international relations, human rights, international security studies, and international law and organization.
The Global Citizenship Commission was convened, under the leadership of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the auspices of NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study, to re-examine the spirit and stirring words of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The result – this volume – offers a 21st-century commentary on the original document, furthering the work of human rights and illuminating the ideal of global citizenship. What does it mean for each of us to be members of a global community? Since 1948, the Declaration has stood as a beacon and a standard for a better world. Yet the work of making its ideals real is far from over. Hideous and systemic human rights abuses continue to be perpetrated at an alarming rate around the world. Too many people, particularly those in power, are hostile to human rights or indifferent to their claims. Meanwhile, our global interdependence deepens. Bringing together world leaders and thinkers in the fields of politics, ethics, and philosophy, the Commission set out to develop a common understanding of the meaning of global citizenship – one that arises from basic human rights and empowers every individual in the world. This landmark report affirms the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and seeks to renew the 1948 enterprise, and the very ideal of the human family, for our day and generation.
For decades, Martti Koskenniemi has not just been an influential writer in international law; his work has caused a significant shift in the direction of the field. This book engages with some of the core questions that have animated Koskenniemi's scholarship so far. Its chapters attest to the breadth and depth of Koskenniemi's oeuvre and the different ways in which he has explored these questions. Koskenniemi's work is applied to a wide range of functional areas in international law and discussed in relation to an even broader range of theoretical perspectives, including history, political theory, sociology and international relations theory. These invaluable insights have been expertly brought together by the volume editors, who identify the key and common themes of many of the book's contributions. This volume demonstrates the importance of critical legal scholarship in the ways international law is enacted, shaped and reshaped over time.
"'Rights' language and practices have been used increasingly in the last decade to address conditions of economic, social, and cultural marginalization. It is still unclear, however, whether such efforts have been effective at promoting transformative social change. Have rights - as embodied in constitutions, statutory and judicial law, international conventions, resolutions, and treaties - fostered demonstrative improvements in the lives of the excluded? When, where, how, and under what conditions? This volume explores these questions through a systematic comparison of the mechanisms, actors, and pathways (MAPs) operating in a diversity of cases, analyzed by established scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds. The MAPs comparative approach provides insights into the conditions under which, and institutions through which, rights 'on the books' are more or less effectively translated into substantive rights realization. We suggest multiple pathways in which litigation may combine with non-legal mechanisms and strategies, including institutionalized and non-institutionalized politics and global and local networks and advocacy. The volume is unique in its synthesis and advancement of parallel issues and debates across different disciplines and geographic regions; it likewise brings into dialogue scholars of economic, social and cultural rights with the scholarship on civil and political rights. These cross-fertilizations allow us to conclude by proposing a series of testable hypotheses about how economic and social rights might be realized, as well as an agenda for future research to broaden and deepen empirical integration and theoretical synthesis in ways that can facilitate human rights realization worldwide."--Provided by publisher.
This vibrant collection of essays reveals the intimate politics of how people with a wide range of relationships to war identify with, and against, the military and its gendered and racialised norms. It synthesises three recent turns in the study of international politics: aesthetics, embodiment and the everyday, into a new conceptual framework. This helps us to understand how militarism permeates society and how far its practices can be re-appropriated or even turned against it.
