Militarism and Human Rights

Through an analysis of the impact of military spending on economic growth, the author argues that militarism and human rights are incompatible. Implementation of the economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights set out in the International Bill of Human Rights requires national mobilization of economic resources. If limited national capital is consumed in excessive military expenditures the feasibility of rights fulfilment diminishes. The article outlines initial public policies designed to limit militarism and to allow international human rights to serve as the cornerstone of domestic and foreign policy.     

Labor Rights as Global Human Rights

Book reviewed in this article:
Edward C. Lorenz, Defining Global Justice: The History of U.S. International Labor Standards Policy     

Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History

This article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth-century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self-determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.     

论人权与主权关系的多重性

人权与主权存在着重大区别：主体不同,内容不同,产生的时间不同,属性不同,涉及的因素不同,领域不同;同时,二又有密切的联系：人权对主权形成挑战,人权的落实受到主权的制约。在人权与主权关系问题上本反对“高于说”：既反对人权高于主权论,也反对主权高于人权论,主张应充分重视人权与主权关系的复杂性。     

西欧中世纪的权利之争与近代人权观的形成

西方的人权理论并非从资产阶级革命中突然产生的,而是有一个长期的形成过程。资产阶级革命前,某种程度上西欧资产阶级已享有某些基本人权,特别是比较充分的经营自主权。所以西方的人权理论是在一种独特的历史传统中形成的,对其他民族来说其内容有独特性和狭隘性的一面。     

The Thought and Role of Ayatollah Hossein'ali Montazeri in the Politics of Post-1979 Iran

Ayatollah Montazeri was a Khomeinist who came to regret being Khomeini's unabashed protegé. Though he has never abandoned the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, he has sought to reconceptualize it by furnishing it with democratic principles. In this, he has not been credible, although he has managed to portray himself as a reformer among some Iranian activists who themselves have credible reformist credentials, such as Akbar Ganji. But other reformists believe that the principles of the mandate of the jurist permit authoritarian abuses. And those among them who seek a mujtahid's support for overthrowing that doctrine would prefer to turn to the writings of Ayatollah Dr. Mehdi Ha'iri (d. 1999).     

Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights:

I would hope that the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, based not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values. These are not just my goals, and they will not be my accomplishments, but the affirmation of our nation's continuing moral strength and our belief in an undiminished, ever-expanding American dream. ¹
President Jimmy Carter, Inaugural Address, 20 January 20, 1977     

论马克思主义人权理论和前苏联人权实践对美国人权政策的影响

长期以来,我国学普遍认为美国人权政策是沿西方轨道发展的。然而新的资料表明,美国人权政策的发展也受到了马克思主义人权观和前苏联人权实践的影响。研究这些影响,有助于了解21世纪美国人权政策的发展趋势,因而具有重要学术价值与现实意义。     

Human Rights Fighter Praises Feudal Serfdom

TheoldTibetunderthe14thDalaiLamahadnohumanrights.Inthe1980s,however,thischiefrenresentativeofthefeudalserfsystemovernightbecameahumanrightsfighter.Repeatedly,heexcitedlyaccusedtheCentralGovernmentofviolatinghumanrights.Therearesomethingsintheworldwhicha…     

评美国的跨国市民社会运动与人权外交

跨国市民社会运动是美国人权外交的重要内容之一。20世纪80年代初,美国、英国、法国和德国等国曾与东欧各国和前苏联在70年代末成立的反对派一起,开展了跨国市民社会运动。这次运动,是促使东欧巨变和前苏联解体的重要原因之一。20世纪末,美国再次强调开展跨国市民社会运动的重要性。在跨国市民社会运动中,美国强调灌输普世人权观的重要意义,并利用经济全球化,使用强制性执行手段等方式来推行美国的人权标准。     

美国宪法改革与人权政策

美国人权政策是建立在古典政治哲学基础之上的,它过分强调人民的消极权利,而忽视了人民的积极权利。随着美国社会的发展,这种人权政策显得越来越不能适应时代的需要。因此,20世纪80年代以来,美国又掀起了宪法改革运动的高潮,以解决宪法中存在的人权概念不清楚和政治自由太多、人民的经济利益太少的问题。在修宪运动中,美国的最高法院发挥了重要的历史作用,使运动取得了一些阶段性成果。但由于种族偏见的根深蒂固,因此美国人权政策的发展依然面临着有待进一步克服的问题。     

Talking of Human Rights: Histories,Heritages, and Human Remains

While the rhetoric of human rights is now globally pervasive, the reality of rights implementation patently lags behind and violations continue to escalate worldwide. An examination of recent books demonstrates that rights talk occupies an increasingly central place in all subfields of anthropology. Problematically, anthropologists are excessively invoking “human rights” to imply a higher order of magnitude for the cases they study than if those cases were framed in terms of other rights and claims. Labeling everything a fundamental human right is detrimental to both ethics and accuracy, especially in the face of acknowledged differences in cultural and historical contexts.     

Human Rights Violations,Corruption, and the Policy of Repression

Quantitative cross‐national research on human rights violations and repression has made considerable progress in identifying and eliminating economic and political factors that influence the use of torture and killing by governments. Warfare tends to increase violations, democracy—notably full democracy—and trade tends to inhibit violations. Where motives have been considered, this research has generally assumed a strategic motivation for government use of repression. Repression is employed to counter threats from the opposition as represented by the presence of warfare. Less attention has been given to the effect of implementation on levels of repression. Theory suggests that agents are likely to make a substantial independent contribution to the level of repression, if given the opportunity. In this article we develop this argument and present cross‐country comparative evidence that suggests that agents’ opportunities for hidden action measured by perceived levels of financial corruption substantially influences the incidence of torture in a political system, after controlling for the strategic motive of governments and the other factors found influential in earlier research. We show that the results are robust and not sensitive to alternative modeling, measurement, and research‐design decisions.     

Human Rights,Care Ethics and Situated Universal Norms

Abstract: As interest in the relationship between geography and ethics grows, it becomes important to examine how different approaches to ethical philosophy may fit with geographic scholarship. To that end, this article focuses on a particular approach to ethical responsibility—international human rights law—and asks how that approach can be put into conversation with discussions in geography about morality, distance and care. It explores three contributions of such a conversation: first, it examines how the relational ontology of care ethics provides a new perspective on the moral value of human rights, so that the relationships and context in question drive the relative value of rights. Second, the article discusses contributions that human rights can bring to questions of caring across distance. Finally, it unpacks the duties that accompany human rights and questions the scope of duty that attaches to the norm of equality.