Despairing at ‘A World Made New’? South Africa Encounters the Post-war Human Rights Idea

ABSTRACT

This article surveys the efforts of the South African state to respond to the reconfigured world that emerged after 1945. Focussed on those years around the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), it argues that South African governments and officials were well attuned to the rising threat of human rights. Drawing on South African archives, it demonstrates that representatives of late United Party and early apartheid era governments were insightful observers of the mortal danger universal human rights posed to the racialised ideological architecture which governed essentially all of the country’s politics and society. Paradoxically, the most avowed opponents of the new crusade for universal human rights perceived its significance with equal or greater acuity than those more enthusiastic about the nascent rights order.     

Redressing Canada’s Second World War Narrative

In early 1942, 23,000 Japanese Canadians on the West Coast were forcibly relocated against their will to the interior of Canada after Japan entered the war against the Allies. This forced relocation left deep scars in that community. Decades later, Japanese Canadians mounted a redress campaign for an official apology and financial restitution. This provocation examines that campaign and explores how it has shaped Canada’s constructed memory of the Second World War.     

“A Different Kind of Theo-Politics: Abraham Joshua Heschel,the Prophets and the Civil Rights Movement”

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the sharp differences in the understanding of the Hebrew prophets by theologians, Jewish and Protestant, in Germany and the United States, with a particular focus on their invocation of prophetic teachings in relation to social and political movements. The sharp denigrations of the prophets – described as ecstatics (Gunkel) or rural naifs (Troeltsch) rendered the prophets useless as figures of inspiration in Germany in relation to racism, colonialism, and WWI. By contrast, the prophets have played a crucial role in American civil thought, especially in the Civil Rights Movement. The distinctive and influential interpretation of prophetic consciousness developed by the German-American Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel is examined for its parallels with the prophetic theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the political ramifications of Heschel's link between prophetic revelation and political leadership.     

Including babies and toddlers: a new model of participation

ABSTRACT

Models relating to the participation of children are often explicitly aimed at facilitating or evaluating participation in decision-making processes on local levels. However, these models often build on hierarchically ordered ‘ladders’ of children’s involvement starting with passive involvement and increasing gradually to highly active engagement. Such models become problematic when designing or evaluating participative activities for young children. On the basis of two ethnographic studies conducted in children’s libraries, we propose an alternative model based on a view of participation as processual rather than definitive. Theoretically, the paper draws mainly on human rights theory as well as on theories and concepts derived from childhood studies such as participation and citizenship. The new model of participation demonstrates how the idea of participation can be operationalized at practical levels to include the very youngest children.