This book examines humanitarian interventions in the post-Cold War era in the context of the development of global capitalism. It argues that it is often our duty to use force to uphold human rights, but that attempts to promote and protect these rights can unintentionally contribute to the perpetuation of poverty and poverty-related problems.
This book develops an analysis of the historical, political and legal contexts behind current demands by NGOs and the United Nations Human Rights Council to hold corporations accountable for their human rights violations. Based on an analysis of the range of mechanisms of accountability that currently exist, it argues that that those demands are a response to the failure of neo-liberal policies that have dominated the practice of politics and law since the emergence of this debate in its current form in the 1970s. Offering a new approach to understanding how struggles for hegemony are refracted through a range of legal challenges to corporate human rights violations, the book offers a fresh perspective for understanding how those struggles are played out in the global sphere. In order to analyse the prospects for using human rights law to challenge the right of corporations to author human rights violations, the book explores the development of a range of political initiatives in the UN, the uses of tort law in domestic courts, and the uses of human rights law at the European Court of Human Rights and at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in how international institutions and NGOs are both shaping and being shaped by global struggles against corporate power.
Set in the context of growing interdisciplinarity in legal research, The Political Economy of International Law: A European Perspective provides a much-needed systematic and coherent review of the interactions between Political Economy and International Law. The book reflects the need felt by international lawyers to open their traditional frontiers to insights from other disciplines - and political economy in particular. The methodological approach of the book is to take the traditional list of topics for a general treatise of international law, and to systematically incorporate insights from political economy to each.
“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.” —Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal “Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.” —George Soros The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice. Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality. “Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse... Sure to provoke a wider discussion.” —Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal “A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana... Consistently bracing.” —Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books “Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice—above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights—need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal... [A] tour de force.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Armenia has experienced a reversal from democratization to a Soviet-style authoritarian regime and has been accused of repressive approaches to human rights. Here, Simon Payaslian juxtaposes a masterful survey of the history of the Armenian people from the nineteenth century through the first republic (1918-21) and Sovietization to the present, with the evolution of international human rights standards, and argues that a statist and authoritarian political culture has impeded political liberalization and institutionalization of human rights principles. Highlighting the clash between sovereignty on one side and human rights and democracy on the other, this comprehensive and in-depth analysis is essential for all those interested in human rights, democratization, political repression and the former Soviet republics.
This comprehensive introduction to the study of human rights in international politics blends concrete developments with theoretical inquiry, illuminating both in the process. Franke Wilmer presents the nuts and bolts of human rights concepts, actors, and implementation before grappling with issues ranging from war and genocide to social and economic needs to racial and religious discrimination. Two themes¿the tension between values and interests, and the role of the state as both a protector of human rights and a perpetrator of human rights violations¿are reflected throughout the text. The result is a clear, accessible exposition of the evolution of international human rights, as well as the challenges that those rights pose, in the context of the state system.
The Struggle over Human Rights: The Non-Aligned Movement, Jimmy Carter, and Neoliberalism traces the origins of the relationship between neoliberalism and the modern doctrine of human rights to the 1970s. It uses empirical evidence to prove that the Carter administration transformed the U.S., and the traditional Western liberal approach to human rights, in response, in part, to the actions of the Non-Aligned Movement. The New International Economic Order (NIEO), a high-point in Non-Aligned solidarity, placed pressures on the power relations of the international system and sought to advance the social and economic rights of the Third World. Carter’s transformation promoted civil and political rights as the only acceptable “human” rights and relegated economic rights to a “basic needs” approach, undercutting welfare state principles in the U.S. and in the newly emergent independent states in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. This doctrine, as the book highlights through extensive archival research, sharpened the definition of international human rights to serve the maintenance of the U.S.-led world order. Carter’s diplomatic use of human rights obfuscated exploitative economic structures and paved the way for an aggressive neoliberal transformation through World Bank and IMF Structural Adjustment Programs under Reagan. Historical studies of human rights have ignored these connections, making this book a unique contribution to the scholarship of human rights.
Over time there has been a miscommunication between mainstream economics and human rights that has paved the way to a justificatory ideology that validates the submission of human rights to the logic of market capitalism. This book shows how the discourse of mainstream economics is intrinsically opposed to the strengthening of human rights and outlines the principles upon which a human rights-based political economy can be built. Considering a variety of recognized human rights, such as the right to water and sanitation, the right to social security, the right to work, cultural freedom and democracy, this book describes how mainstream economics theory conflicts with these rights and explores alternative modes of thinking that incorporate human rights concerns into economics. Moreover, the book also reflects on the teaching of political economy for human rights. It sets out that a political economy favourable to human rights must be pluralist, interdisciplinary, participatory, de-commodified, non-utilitarian and non-consequentialist. The author proposes that it must not only assume the performative character of economics but also, and especially, its transformative purpose. Political Economy for Human Rights will offer students, academics, activists and policy makers useful tools to understand some of the main contradictions of contemporary societies and new paths leading to a more just and fraternal world. It will also be of great interest to the general public concerned with human rights and economic issues.
The plethora of literature produced over the past decade in response to the perceived failure of the human rights project to deliver results for billions of people living in ‘adverse’ environments has usually focused on international legal standards and mechanisms, with little regard for the root structural realities that constrain their implementation. Hence, a text that primarily focuses on the major challenge of realisation of human rights in the context of diverse realities is urgently needed. This book, then, provides an analytical as well as inspirational text on human rights from a contextual perspective; it offers a reconceptualisation of human rights as not merely legal resources, but political tools as well. After an introduction that familiarizes the reader with some of the key concepts used throughout, the book is divided into six chapters. The first two combine a critique of the overly legal use of human rights with a reconceptualisation of their potential as powerful tools outside of the legal context. The next two chapters examine the nature of the structural challenges that face realisation, both on the global and on the local level. The last two chapters analyse two major areas of the human rights deficit: the structural non-implementation of the rights of the poor and the failing protection of non-dominant collectivities. Finally, a concluding chapter elaborates on the main findings and insights gained. The book combines rigorous juridical study with a focus on political-economic analysis of rights in context. Hence, it aims at an interdisciplinary treatment of human rights as opposed to current texts that have a tendency to be monodisciplinary. The book should be of interest to students of human rights, political economy, law and conflict studies, as well as those who work or research in these areas.
Unlike many other countries, the United States has few constitutional guarantees of social welfare rights such as income, housing, or healthcare. In part this is because many Americans believe that the courts cannot possibly enforce such guarantees. However, recent innovations in constitutional design in other countries suggest that such rights can be judicially enforced--not by increasing the power of the courts but by decreasing it. In Weak Courts, Strong Rights, Mark Tushnet uses a comparative legal perspective to show how creating weaker forms of judicial review may actually allow for stronger social welfare rights under American constitutional law. Under "strong-form" judicial review, as in the United States, judicial interpretations of the constitution are binding on other branches of government. In contrast, "weak-form" review allows the legislature and executive to reject constitutional rulings by the judiciary--as long as they do so publicly. Tushnet describes how weak-form review works in Great Britain and Canada and discusses the extent to which legislatures can be expected to enforce constitutional norms on their own. With that background, he turns to social welfare rights, explaining the connection between the "state action" or "horizontal effect" doctrine and the enforcement of social welfare rights. Tushnet then draws together the analysis of weak-form review and that of social welfare rights, explaining how weak-form review could be used to enforce those rights. He demonstrates that there is a clear judicial path--not an insurmountable judicial hurdle--to better enforcement of constitutional social welfare rights.
