Browsing by Subject "Human rights"
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Item Contestation and collectivies: protecting labor organizing rights in the global economy.(2008-06) Kang, Susan LeeThis dissertation argues that despite the near universal levels of state ratification of treaties protecting international labor organizing rights, states do not necessary comply with these rights under the current period of economic globalization. This is because the foundational conditions of these norms--specific to the political, ethical and economic concerns of the post-war liberal order--have changed as increased economic competition, financial and trade flows have created new material and political priorities for states. However, the human rights aspects of labor organizing rights have provided useful opportunities for labor unions to promote these norms within international institutions. International institutions are empowered by law to then make recommendations to states regarding states' compliance with these labor rights norms. I investigate this interaction between states, labor unions, and international institutions in their contestations over labor organizing rights. I call this process norm contestation, as the actors involved participate in a process of contestation regarding a state's obligations to protect labor organizing rights, resulting from the softer legalization of these norms in international law. I argue that both interest and identity-based factors can lead to greater compliance, despite these changes in state incentives. Compliance is more likely to occur when three factors are present: recommendations from multiple international institutions, trade union and other activist networks, and a state's international identity or reputation ambitions. I investigate this argument through historical comparative case research on the recommendations by international institutions on labor organizing rights laws in South Korea, Canada, and the United Kingdom.Item Engaging Gaming Communities For Human Rights: An NGO Toolkit(2024-05-01) Hassan, WajihThis paper explores everything nonprofit organizations (NGOs) need to know about when engaging online gaming communities for human rights purposes. The research employs qualitative methods such as interviews with gaming community influencers; digital ethnography such as participant observation and engagement with several online gaming communities and some content analysis over different social media platforms; and a literature review. This paper focuses on understanding humanitarian work within gaming communities, tools and methods that NGOs need to use and be aware of in online gaming spaces, and provides a toolkit that encapsulates the information from this research into a practical and easily digestible guidance for NGOs hoping to utilize online gaming communities for human rights.Item The globalization of childhood: the role of law and norms in the global abolition of the death penalty for child offenders.(2010-07) Linde, Robyn MicheleThis dissertation examines how an idea that begins in one part of the world becomes a global norm that almost all states in the international system obey. It investigates the processes of normative development and global diffusion through the study of a single norm: the prohibition of the death penalty for child offenders under the age 18. The dissertation traces the life cycle of this norm from its origins to its rapid global spread in the 1960s and 1970s to the present, when it has been internalized by most countries while also strongly contested by a handful of others. Through case studies of the death penalty policies of China, Ethiopia, France, Japan, Kenya, Pakistan, Tanzania, Tunisia, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as through institutional case studies of UNICEF and Amnesty International, I argue that abolition of the death penalty for child offenders diffused as a key part of a globalized childhood. This globalized childhood originated in parts of Europe and the United States and spread via the colonial powers of Britain and France. In the last few decades of the 20th century, international law addressing children homogenized state policies, further crystallizing the norm against the child death penalty. By considering how states incorporate a specific norm into their domestic value system and legal framework, I explain how such factors as state structure, international pressure, domestic-level actors (such as NGOs and social movements) and law produce human rights change and catalyze international transformation.Item The impact of human rights law in time(2013-07) Dancy, Geoffrey T.International human rights law is often disparaged either for having no positive impact on government repression or for having negative unintended consequences that lead to even worse repressive violence. Most empirical scholarship on human rights indicates that the root causes of widespread repression--authoritarianism, democratic instability, and civil war--are beyond the reach of legal rules. The contribution of this project is to demonstrate that human rights law in fact has an important role to play in addressing these root causes. I argue that the human rights legal action, under certain conditions, promotes democracy and prevents conflict recurrence. This takes time. By slowly changing state-society interactions, the pursuit of human rights legalization is causally related to lessened repressive violence. Importantly, though, these contributions are not guaranteed, and they are dependent on the creation of domestic human rights constituencies. In support of my argument, I uncover relationships between human rights legal actions and regime change, broadly defined, that have so far remained unobserved. These relationships have been obscured within the existing literature for two reasons. First, detailed data on various legal mechanisms has until recently been lacking. Using new data collected over a 3-year period in coordination with the Oxford-Minnesota Transitional Justice Collaborative (OMTJC), in addition to other longitudinal data from a variety of sources, I address this data deficit in my research. Second, to see the positive impact of human rights legal action on democracy and peace, one must zoom out and observe change over the long term. This dissertation is the first to give serious consideration to issues of time and process in the study of human rights law. In its wide sweep, the dissertation also provides new evidence of robust links between social movements and pursuit of rights-based legalization; between `transitional justice' and the long-term decline of repression; and between enforcement of human rights law and the non-recurrence of civil war. Overall, I find reason to be skeptical of human rights critics, who base their arguments about consequences on short-term events, rather than analyzing larger processes of social transformation.Item Indigenous global politics.(2009-11) Lightfoot, Sheryl RaeThe Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed the United Nations General Assembly on September 13, 2007. This document articulates the minimum international standard on indigenous peoples' rights that nation states are obligated to recognize and protect. It took more than thirty years of intense effort by the indigenous rights movement to achieve passage of the Declaration. This dissertation explores how indigenous politics at the global level compels a new direction of thought in International Relations. I argue that indigenous global politics is a perspective of International Relations that complicates the structure of international politics in new and important ways, challenging both Westphalian notions of state sovereignty and the (neo-)liberal foundations of states and the international system. A case study of the international indigenous peoples' movement and the development of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples demonstrates how attempts to secure indigenous rights at the international level are helping to forge new articulations of the concepts of sovereignty, the state, and territoriality. I have also detected a peculiar pattern of state response to these changes, a pattern that was previously undetected, unexamined and thus also unnamed in International Relations. I have termed this puzzling pattern "over-compliance," by which I mean that a state's indigenous rights policy behavior goes above and beyond its international commitments. My qualitative case studies of Canadian and New Zealand indigenous rights "over-compliance," based on original field research, analyze both the potential and the limits of the challenges posed by indigenous global politics. My research identifies several mechanisms that explain both legal "over-compliance" with treaty standards and de facto policy under-compliance, including the domestic and international strength of transnational indigenous movements and coalitions, and changes within a state's domestic political discourse regarding indigenous reconciliation.Item The Rights of Peasants: Achieving Environmental Justice in the Age of Pesticide Use and Digitalization(2021-11) Alexander, Trinity TPeasants are a distinct sociocultural group that face a myriad of threats to their human rights. Peasants’ dependency on land makes them especially vulnerable to environmentally-related rights abuses. This research focused on two areas that are highly susceptible to abuses: pesticide use and digitalization of rural processes. By reviewing various scholarly papers, non-scholarly papers, and UN documents, we found that peasants are severely neglected in discussions surrounding pesticides and digitalization, despite the fact that such issues threaten their food sovereignty, cultural, health, and various other human rights. We hope that such findings will encourage further study and worldly attention on the unique rights of peasants.Item Seeking justice during war: accountability in conflicted democracies.(2012-08) Lynch, Moira KatherineIn the past several years, the transitional justice literature has generated theories concerning varying human rights accountability outcomes in states transitioning from authoritarianism and violent conflict. Most of these theories are based on transition and post-conflict dynamics. However, a subset of these cases, democracies that have experienced internal conflict, cannot accurately be explained by these theories. Human rights trials and truth-seeking measures are overwhelmingly conducted during the violence in conflicted democracies, thus it is not appropriate to theorize accountability outcomes in these cases based on transition or post-conflict dynamics. Yet, these cases continue to be included in large N datasets and research that formulates explanations on why some countries implement accountability mechanisms while others do not. I assert that it is necessary to consider these cases in a different light. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and Spain, I argue that the causal mechanisms that shaped prosecutions and truth-seeking measures in these cases were rooted in the pre-conflict milieu. Vertical, horizontal and external relations of accountability, including political competition, civil society pressure, judicial independence and pressure from international institutions, prompted accountability mechanisms in all three countries. The variation across the cases in terms of the prosecution record and the use of truth-seeking measures is explained by the extent to which these relations of accountability were available and operating efficiently prior to the conflict. The efficiency of these relations, in turn, was shaped by the presence/absence of entrenched emergency laws.Item The United Nations Security Council and humanitarian intervention: Causal stories about human rights and war.(2008-06) Walling, Carrie BoothA dramatic shift in international practice emerged in the 1990s when the United Nations Security Council authorized military humanitarian intervention to stop gross human rights violations. During the Cold War, the Security Council did not halt mass killing and sanctioned states that intervened in sovereign states, despite humanitarian motives or effects. It has responded unevenly to mass killing, however. This dissertation seeks to answer the puzzle of why the Security Council intervenes militarily in defense of human rights in some places but fails to stop ethnic cleansing in others. It traces the emergence of a new norm of humanitarian intervention, the course of its evolution (1991-2004) and the conditions of its use. The dissertation relies on qualitative, comparative case studies: the establishment of no-fly zones in Iraq; three cases of Security Council authorized humanitarian intervention (Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sierra Leone); and three "non-cases" where humanitarian intervention might have been expected but was not authorized (Rwanda, Kosovo and Darfur, Sudan). There is a connection between the ways that Council Members argue about conflicts and their intervention decisions. For humanitarian intervention to become possible, members of the Security Council, including most of its permanent members, must adopt or accede to a common story about the character of the conflict and its resultant human rights violations-- an intentional causal story with clear victims and identifiable and intentional perpetrators. When significant contestation over competing causal stories occurs, the success of any particular causal story is mediated by: the extent to which humanitarian intervention in that particular case would conflict with or complement the highly internalized norms of state sovereignty and non-intervention; the support of Great Power leadership; and the coherence between causal stories and expert testimony, forensic evidence, and media imagery on the cause and character of the conflict. I conclude that humanitarian intervention does not threaten sovereignty but reformulates it to include citizen protection and the recognition of fundamental human rights. The nascent norm of humanitarian intervention, encapsulated in the responsibility to protect, is gaining international support but has not yet cascaded throughout the international system.