"The present guide offers information related to norms and mechanisms developed to protect the rights of persons belonging to national, ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities. It includes detailed information about procedures and forums in which minority issues may be raised to minorities and by also covering selected specialized agencies and regional mechanisms, the present Guide complements information contained in Working with the United Nations Human Rights Programme: A Handbook for Civil Society"--Introduction.
Winner of the American Sociological Association's 2019 Asia and Asian American Section Book Award Winner of the American Sociological Association's 2019 Political Sociology Section Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award Since the late 1970s, the three most salient minority groups in Japan - the politically dormant Ainu, the active but unsuccessful Koreans, and the former outcaste group of Burakumin - have all expanded their activism despite the unfavorable domestic political environment. In Rights Make Might, Kiyoteru Tsutsui examines why, and finds an answer in the galvanizing effects of global human rights on local social movements. Tsutsui chronicles the transformative impact of global human rights ideas and institutions on minority activists, which changed their understandings about their standing in Japanese society and propelled them to new international venues for political claim making. The global forces also changed the public perception and political calculus in Japan over time, catalyzing substantial gains for their movements. Having benefited from global human rights, all three groups repaid their debt by contributing to the consolidation and expansion of human rights principles and instruments outside of Japan. Drawing on interviews and archival data, Rights Make Might offers a rich historical comparative analysis of the relationship between international human rights and local politics that contributes to our understanding of international norms and institutions, social movements, human rights, ethnoracial politics, and Japanese society.
This book explores the ways in which minority groups across the world are reshaping the international minority rights protection system. It documents the actions of four major groups that are using transnational social mobilisation to achieve recognition of their identities and their rights. The result is a greater pluralism in global identity politics and a wide range of new group-specific standards that can inform policies on multiculturalism, political participation, and socio-economic inclusion in the national and international spheres. The book begins by summarising the learning from the global movements of indigenous peoples and Roma. The book then focuses in greater depth on the cases of Afro-descendants in Latin America and of Dalits and caste-affected groups in South Asia and beyond. Each case study shows the historical roots of group-specific transnational mobilisation and how activists have constructed a distinct identity frame out of shared experiences. The book explores key parallels and differences between the discourse, framing strategies, organisational structures and political opportunities used in each case to show which factors have influenced the success or failures of their norm entrepreneurship. The role that international institutions have played in supporting these efforts is given special attention, including intergovernmental bodies such as the UN, the EU and the OAS, and international non-governmental organisations. The UN World Conference Against Racism is explored as a particularly significant political opportunity across the cases. Among academic audiences, this book will appeal to those researching minority rights, social movements, global governance, discrimination and multiculturalism from legal, political, sociological and critical theory perspectives. It will also interest practitioners and activists working on minority rights and the challenges of norm compliance, socio-economic inclusion and governance.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Minority movements tirelessly continue to engage in the process of social change, trying to promote and enforce minority protection norms and to have their world views, cultural practices, and norms recognized by the state. Through an examination of selected cases, this book problematizes how collective identities are not structurally guaranteed but rather constructed in dialectically interrelated positions and identity layers. The authors show the kind of impact that these processes can, or fail to, have on minority norms, actors, and strategies. Going beyond abstract normative principles, this collection reflects both Global North as well as Global South perspectives and examines through a variety of angles the role that race and ethnicity, culture, or religion play within social mobilization towards social change. The volume offers global insight on actor and strategy attempts to foster social change through the instrumental use and interpretation of minority rights as norms. This book will be of interest to those researching minority rights broadly understood within the disciplines of law, anthropology, sociology, and political science.
In the wake of the black civil rights movement, other disadvantaged groups of Americans began to make headway. In the first book to take a broad perspective on this wide-ranging and far-reaching phenomenon, Skrentny exposes the connections between the diverse actions and circumstances that contributed to this revolution.
Minority Rights, Majority Rule seeks to explain a phenomenon evident to most observers of the US Congress. In the House of Representatives, majority parties rule and minorities are seldom able to influence national policy making. In the Senate, minorities quite often call the shots, empowered by the filibuster to frustrate the majority. Why did the two chambers develop such distinctive legislative styles? Conventional wisdom suggests that differences in the size and workload of the House and Senate led the two chambers to develop very different rules of procedure. Sarah Binder offers an alternative, partisan theory to explain the creation and suppression of minority rights, showing that contests between partisan coalitions have throughout congressional history altered the distribution of procedural rights. Most importantly, new majorities inherit procedural choices made in the past. This institutional dynamic has fuelled the power of partisan majorities in the House but stopped them in their tracks in the Senate.
The book questions the classic idea of self-determination – the right to self-determination is a right of peoples, not of minorities – by examining the content of the right to self-determination and the content of minority rights. Self-determination has four dimensions: the political, the economic, the social and the cultural dimensions. Minorities have minority rights that touch on most aspects of life as a member of a minority. If there is an overlap between minority rights and the different dimensions of self-determination, the concept that the right to self-determination is only applicable to peoples loses credibility. No global and general conclusion is envisaged; there are restrictions in place. The work is limited to the European framework and is further restricted to classic minorities. The argument is based on a legitimacy and justice approach. The analysis in this book shows that some minority rights overlap with the different dimensions of internal self-determination. In short, classic minorities in Europe have a right to internal self-determination.
Black Lives and Bathrooms: Racial and Gendered Reactions to Minority Rights Movements examines how people respond to minority movements in ways that maintain existing patterns of racial and gender inequality. By studying the Black Lives Matter and Transgender Bathroom Access movement efforts, J.E. Sumerau and Eric Anthony Grollman analyze how cisgender white people define minority movements in relation to their existing notions of United States social norms; react to minority movements utilizing racial, classed, gendered, and sexual stereotypes that reinforce racism, sexism, and cissexism in society; and propose ways that racial and gender minorities could gain conditional acceptance by behaving in ways cisgender white people find more comfortable and normal. Throughout this work, Sumerau and Grollman note how assumptions about whiteness and cisnormativity are spread as cisgender white people respond to racial and gender movements seeking social change.
Human and Minority Rights Protection by Multiple Diversity Governance provides a comprehensive overview and critical analysis of minority protection through national constitutional law and international law in Europe. Using a critical theoretical and methodological approach, this textbook: provides a historical analysis of state formation and nation building in Europe with context of religious wars and political revolutions, including the (re-)conceptualisation of basic concepts and terms such as territoriality, sovereignty, state, nation and citizenship; deconstructs all primordial theories of ethnicity and provides a sociologically informed political theory for how to reconcile the functional prerequisites for political unity, legal equality and social cohesion with the preservation of cultural diversity; examines the liberal and nationalist ideological framing of minority protection in liberal-democratic regimes, including the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice; analyses the ongoing trend of re-nationalisation in all parts of Europe and the number of legal instruments and mechanisms from voting rights to proportional representation in state bodies, forms of cultural and territorial autonomy and federalism. This textbook will be essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners interested in European politics, human and minority rights, constitutional and international law, governance and nationalism. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
