Transnational environmental obligations: locating new spaces of accountability in a post-Westphalian global order

The growth of transnational environmental harm is not only leading to new obligations between states, it is also recasting democratic accountability for the crossboundary environmental performance of public and private actors. Informed by pragmatist ideas on public discourse, I propose a conceptual schema for understanding the moral geography of these new transnational environmental obligations: they mark out non-territorial spaces of public communication delimited according to moral precepts of harm prevention, inclusiveness and impartiality. I outline how the recognition of transnational affected publics is reconstituting and rescaling environmental accountability within international regimes of harm prevention and liability. The critical geopolitical challenge in institutionalizing non-territorial domains of environmental accountability will be the mapping and empowerment of transnational affected publics.     

Transitional justice and human rights in Afghanistan

Like other societies emerging from protracted conflict, Afghanistan confronts a legacy of past crimes and violence. Communist rulers, Soviet occupiers, rural resistance fighters, Islamist parties, the Taleban movement, Pakistani volunteers, al-Qaeda members, power-seeking warlords, and the anti-Taliban coalition all contributed more or less to the litany of abuses since 1978. Almost no one in the society has been untouched, and almost no one with any power has clean hands. For these very reasons, caution and care are necessary. Demobilizing and reintegrating tens of thousands of irregular militia, as well as creating new security forces are the necessary conditions for the rest of the peace-building agenda, and, as shown by the author's first-hand experience in the Bonn negotiations over the post-Taleban succession, raising the issue of past crimes prematurely may lead fighters to revert to previous modes of behaviour. He argues for a careful start that emphasizes documenting the scale of the abuses with an emphasis on the suffering of the victims rather than the guilt of the perpetrators, in order gradually to support an Afghan debate on how to reconcile the society with its history.     

Making progress in global health: the need for new paradigms

This article takes the state of health in the world today as the starting point for a backward look at the trajectory that has led to our current position and speculation about prospects for improved global health in the future. Our model of social development and its dominant value system, which has promoted scientific progress but has also brought about great social, economic and health instability, is interrogated. This leads to questions such as what it means to be healthy and what the practice of medicine is about. Three potential scenarios for global health in the future are outlined. It is suggested that deep introspection about our current value system is required to achieve a paradigm shift that could reverse current trends and lead both to improvements in health globally and to less human insecurity. The authors conclude that while we have the material resources to achieve ambitious goals we may lack the moral and political will to do so. An expanded discourse on ethics and human rights—as well as on the limits of what is politically possible— may provide the impetus to drive change towards an improved global economic system and better health globally.     

Prudence and principle in international society: reflections on Vincent's approach to human rights

John Vincent's Human rights and International Relations argued for embedding the right to be free from starvation in the international society of states. Principle and prudence were combined in a distinctive English School analysis of the universal human rights culture. Vincent argued that the entitlement to be free from the tyranny of starvation and malnutrition was one principle on which most societies could agree despite their profound ideological differences. Other conceptions of human rights, including western liberal doctrines of individual freedom, had the potential to create major divisions within international society, particularly when linked with a doctrine of humanitarian intervention. More recent approaches to world poverty raise large questions about whether Vincent succeeded in attempting to marry prudence in preserving an international order that remains anchored in state sovereignty with a principled commitment to ending starvation. Important issues also arise about how to build on his reflections on the prospects for a global ‘civilizing process’ that bridges cultural and political differences in the first universal society of states.     

The nationalisation of the human rights debate in Egypt

ABSTRACT. The study of nationalism in Egypt has often focused on Arab nationalism and its relevance to the post‐colonial state building process. The current article shifts the focus to the Egyptian state's strategic use of nationalism as a mechanism for survival and for shoring up its failing legitimacy. In particular, the case of the human rights debate is chosen to show the regime's most recent attempt to ‘nationalise’ a rising movement which promotes universalism and poses a threat to the notion of the nation's homogeneity. By misrepresenting human rights organisations as mouthpieces of Western imperialist powers, the regime has managed to create an image of these organisations as posing a threat to Egypt's national security and undermining its international ‘reputation’. More recently, however, the state has refined its discourse on human rights by promoting an image whereby it is the ‘official agent’ of a more nationalistically defined human rights movement.     

A spatial analysis of human fertility in Scotland: Reappraisal and extension

In an earlier study of Scottish fertility (Jones, 1975) it was concluded that a substantial part of the areal variability in county and major city Crude Birth Rates could be attributed to variations in age structure and, to a lesser extent, socio‐economic composition. Because Crude Birth Rate levels are affected by population composition this study seeks to determine the extent to which areal variations in reproduction can be attributed to behavioural rather than structural effects. It is suggested that areal differences in Scottish reproductive behaviour reflect well defined, deeply ingrained and temporally persistent differences within Scottish society.     

The modernizing bias of human rights: stories of mass killings and genocide in Central America

This article analyses selected cases of mass killings and genocide during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and the way in which the truth commissions in both countries reframed locally grounded narratives to fit the state-centred language of human rights. Redefining wrongdoings as human rights violations produces stories that communicate poorly with local worldviews because the 'truths' that human rights language proposes disregard local realities and transform local conflicts into a type of 'modern', nationwide struggles. Thus, while the concept of genocide might capture well the horrendous nature of a mass killing, it will also ethnify the conflict. Comparisons between local readings and human rights-based reinterpretations reveal a 'modernizing' or 'Westernizing' bias of international law; the article argues for more awareness about such effects in analysis as well as in policy-making.     

Citizens and scientists: toward a gendered history of scientific practice in post-revolutionary France

Because the French Revolution failed to produce a widely acceptable definition of citizenship, the limits of manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century were uncertain. Social practices, in particular scientific activity, served as claims to the status of citizen. By engaging in scientific pastimes, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that they possessed the rationality and autonomy that liberal theorists associated both with manliness and with civic capacity. However, bourgeois science was never a stable signifier of masculinity or of competence. As professional science emerged, the bourgeois amateur increasingly became the feminised object of satire rather than the sober and meritorious citizen-scientist.     

Collateral damage: human rights consequences of counterterrorist action in the Asia–Pacific

A number of states in the Asia-Pacific region have long been recognized to be indifferent or even hostile to the international human rights regime and to have rather poor records when it comes to protection of the right to personal integrity. Since 9/11 many of these same states have become closely involved in the US-led anti-terrorist campaign, and in the course of that involvement have been identified with the serious abuse of the personal security rights of those held in detention as terrorist suspects. This article uncovers some of the bases for that indifference to human rights treaties and why the human rights records of some of these states have become of even greater concern, particularly to domestic and transnational NGOs, in the contemporary anti-terrorist era. It argues that long-standing factors associated with intra-state armed conflict and separatist rebellions, the governmental tendency to accuse domestic NGOS of following a western rights agenda, and strong attachment to the non-interference norm have undercut official governmental concerns about the abuse of the right to personal security. More recently, emulation of the worst aspects of US anti-terrorist behaviour has given rise to a sense of impunity in some cases, and has justified a militarized response to political and religious unrest in others. Finally, the difficulties that the local human rights NGOs have had in making their case to the wider domestic populations have been compounded in a climate where many of their fellow citizens are fearful of the apparent rise in support for terrorist causes and methods.     

Managing Difference: Gender and culture in humanitarian emergencies

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has a mandate to respond to crises of human displacement on a global scale. The ways in which the organization conceives of gender and culture in this humanitarian context are problematic because they tend either to essentialize 'woman' and 'culture' in the planning process or to minimize the meaning and implications of these differences vis-a-vis gender policies which focus on integration. In this article, the discourse of 'UN humanism' is analyzed, noting a long-standing tension between culture as shared humanity and culture as a pivotal basis of difference. Drawing on current research relating to UNHCR's gender policies and on initiatives against violence towards refugee women in camps, the implications of overarching frameworks which attend to gender and cultural differences are discussed. Strategies to avoid authenticating or fixing categories of difference, on the one hand, and to avoid treating gender and culture as simply variables, on the other, are proposed in the context of emerging transnational feminist practices. Transnational approaches point to important interventions which may serve to unravel the dominant discourses of UN humanism and vulnerable groups that continue to organize UN refugee and humanitarian operations today.     

Neoliberalism and gender analysis mainstreaming in Aotearoa/New Zealand

In this article, I explore the impact of neoliberalism on the gender analysis mainstreaming initiative launched in 1996 by the Ministry of Women's Affairs in the government of Aotearoa/New Zealand. I argue that elements of neoliberal discourse worked against the feminist potential of The Full Picture, the instructional document that was developed by the Ministry to assist policy analysts across government in learning how to use gender analysis in all phases of their work. I also review various strategies for fostering the systematic implementation of gender analysis mainstreaming that have been pursued and argue that none of these has yet proven effective, including proposals to encourage the practice of gender analysis by incorporating measures of its use into the performance management framework established through neoliberal reforms to the public service.