Download or read book Seeing the Myth in Human Rights written by Jenna Reinbold and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeing the Myth in Human Rights explores the role of myth in the creation and propagation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Drawing on records, publications, and speeches from the Declaration's creators as well as current scholarship on human rights, Jenna Reinbold sees the Declaration as an exemplar of modern mythmaking.
Download or read book Myth of Universal Human Rights written by David N. Stamos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking and provocative new book, philosopher of science David N. Stamos challenges the current conceptions of human rights, and argues that the existence of universal human rights is a modern myth. Using an evolutionary analysis to support his claims, Stamos traces the origin of the myth from the English Levellers of 1640s London to our modern day. Theoretical defenses of the belief in human rights are critically examined, including defenses of nonconsensus concepts. In the final chapter Stamos develops a method of naturalized normative ethics, which he then applies to topics routinely dealt with in terms of human rights. In all of this Stamos hopes to show that there is a better way of dealing with matters of ethics and justice, a way that involves applying the whole of our evolved moral being, rather than only parts of it, and that is fiction-free.
Download or read book Seeing the Myth in Human Rights written by Jenna Reinbold and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been called one of the most powerful documents in human history. Today, the mere accusation of violations of the rights outlined in this document cows political leaders and riles the international community. Yet as a nonbinding document with no mechanism for enforcement, it holds almost no legal authority. Indeed, since its adoption, the Declaration's authority has been portrayed not as legal or political but as moral. Rather than providing a set of rules to follow or laws to obey, it represents a set of standards against which the world's societies are measured. It has achieved a level of rhetorical power and influence unlike anything else in modern world politics, becoming the foundational myth of the human rights project. Seeing the Myth in Human Rights presents an interdisciplinary investigation into the role of mythmaking in the creation and propagation of the Universal Declaration. Pushing beyond conventional understandings of myth, which tend to view such narratives as vehicles either for the spreading of particular religious dogmas or for the spreading of erroneous, even duplicitous, discourses, Jenna Reinbold mobilizes a robust body of scholarship within the field of religious studies to help us appreciate myth as a mode of human labor designed to generate meaning, solidarity, and order. This usage does not merely parallel today's scholarship on myth; it dovetails in unexpected ways with a burgeoning body of scholarship on the origin and function of contemporary human rights, and it puts the field of religious studies into conversation with the fields of political philosophy, critical legal studies, and human rights historiography. For Reinbold, myth is a phenomenon that is not merely germane to the exploration of specific religious narratives but is key to a broader understanding of the nature of political authority in the modern world.
Download or read book Refugees and the Myth of Human Rights written by Emma Larking and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Western liberal democracies are parties to the United Nations Refugees Convention and all are committed to the recognition of basic human rights, but they also spend billions fortifying their borders, detaining unauthorised immigrants, and policing migration. Meanwhile, public debate over the West’s obligations to unauthorised immigrants is passionate, vitriolic, and divisive. Refugees and the Myth of Human Rights combines philosophical, historical, and legal analysis to clarify the key concepts at stake in the debate, and to demonstrate the threat posed by contemporary border regimes to rights protection and the rule of law within liberal democracies. Using the political philosophy of John Locke and Immanuel Kant the book highlights the tension in liberalism between partiality towards one’s compatriots and the universalism of human rights and brings this tension to life through an examination of Hannah Arendt’s account of the rise and decline of the modern nation-state. It provides a novel reading of Arendt’s critique of human rights and her concept of the right to have rights. The book argues that the right to have rights must be secured globally in limited form, but that recognition of its significance should spur expansive changes to border policy within and between liberal states.
Download or read book Myth or Lived Reality written by Claire Boost and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapters How Human Rights Cross-Pollinate and Take Root: Local Governments & Refugees in Turkey by Elif Durmuş and Human Rights Localisation and Individual Agency: From ‘Hobby of the Few’ to the Few Behind the Hobby by Tihomir Sabchev, Sara Miellet, and Elif Durmuş are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com This book seeks to explore, from a multidisciplinary perspective, whether human rights are, in fact, a myth or a lived reality. Over the years much has been said about their effectiveness or, rather, their ineffectiveness. This perceived ineffectiveness relates not only to institutional challenges at the international level, but also to national implementation mechanisms and processes. In addition, questions have arisen as to whether individuals or groups of individuals actually benefit from the normative guarantees contained in human rights law and whether human rights as legal constructs can be effectively translated into better outcomes. This volume can be distinguished from the existing literature by virtue of the fact that it not only brings together scholars at different stages of their careers, but also that it incorporates contributions that adopt different methodological perspectives and cover a variety of topics. The book should prove of great benefit to human rights researchers, human rights practitioners, NGOs and students. Claire Boost is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Maastricht University. Andrea Broderick is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International and European Law, Maastricht University. Fons Coomans is a Professor at the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Peace, Department of International and European Law, Maastricht University. Roland Moerland is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Maastricht University.
Download or read book The Last Utopia written by Samuel Moyn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.
Download or read book Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History written by Steven L. B. Jensen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-06 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights, from the Middle Ages to the present. It debunks the myth that social rights are 'second-generation rights' – rights that appeared after World War II as additions to a rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment. Not only do social rights stretch back that far; they arguably pre-date the Enlightenment. In tracing their long history across various global contexts, this volume reveals how debates over social rights have often turned on deeper struggles over social obligation – over determining who owes what to whom, morally and legally. In the modern period, these struggles have been intertwined with questions of freedom, democracy, equality and dignity. Many factors have shaped the history of social rights, from class, gender and race to religion, empire and capitalism. With incomparable chronological depth, geographical breadth and conceptual nuance, Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History sets an agenda for future histories of human rights.
Download or read book Decolonizing Human Rights written by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-09 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances practical protection of human rights, and challenge claims of western monopoly of human rights discourse.
Download or read book Human Rights Standards written by Makau Mutua and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bracing critique of human rights law and activism from the perspective of the Global South. How are human rights norms made, who makes them, and why? In Human Rights Standards, Makau Mutua traces the history of the human rights project and critically explores how the norms of the human rights movement have been created. Examining key texts and documents published since the inception of the human rights movement at the end of World War II, he crafts a bracing critique of these works from the hitherto underutilized perspective of the Global South. Attention is focused on the deficits of the international order and how that order, which is defined by multiple asymmetries, defines human rights in a manner that exhibits normative gaps and cultural biases. Mutua identifies areas of further norm development and concludes that norm-creating processes must be inclusive and participatory to garner legitimacy across various cleavages and divides. The result is the first truly comprehensive critical look at the making of human rights norms and standards and, as such, will be an invaluable resource for students, scholars, activists, and policymakers interested in this important topic.
Download or read book Myth written by Robert Alan Segal and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Very Short Introduction explores different approaches to myth from several disciplines, including science, religion, philosophy, literature, and psychology. In this new edition, Robert Segal considers both the future study of myth as well as the impact of areas such as cognitive science and the latest approaches to narrative theory.
Download or read book Human Rights Compliant Counterterrorism written by Jayson S. Lamchek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical take on the convergence of human rights discourse with the counterterrorism agenda revealing its effects on developing countries.
Download or read book Living Myths written by J. F. Bierlein and published by Wellspring/Ballantine. This book was released on 1999 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals how key myths of the world present timeless truths that enrich our understanding of the world and the role humans play today.
Download or read book The Myth of the Litigious Society written by David M. Engel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the United States is often called the Land of the Law Suit, in reality Americans hardly sue at all. In fact, when it comes to physical injuries, over 90% of the time, we--as David M. Engel points out in his engaging and provocative book--simply lump it, making no claims against either the injurers or their insurance companies. Bringing to bear an impressive array of research and data, Engel firmly and persuasively demolishes the pervasive myth of the litigious American. But why don t most people sue whey they have been wrongfully physically injured? We have in fact a mystery, what Engel calls The Case of the Missing Plaintiff. The solution his investigation leads us to is as fascinating as it is unexpected. Engel reconstructs how people who suffer injuries actually react to them. When real people experience physical injuries, their lives, thoughts, and emotions are profoundly disrupted and compromised. They often have difficulty thinking clearly and acting decisively. Human nature, our immediate friends and families, and broader social and cultural factors all tend again injury victims making claims. And as often as one might have heard of victim-blaming, self-blame is one of the most common reactions of victims to their injuries. Ultimately Engel shows that the proliferation of law and regulations in our society is not the problem. The real problem is the law s failure to protect those who suffer wrongful injuries. Tort law is usually said to serve three purposes that even those who want to curtail law suits would agree on: to compensate losses suffered by injury victims, to deter unnecessarily risky and harmful behavior, and to correct the moral injustice that results when one person or group injures another. Engel s book clearly and powerfully shows that none of these purposes is being met and concludes his investigation with recommendations for how they might be."
Download or read book The Myth of Digital Democracy written by Matthew Hindman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthew Hindman reveals here that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has done little to broaden political discourse in the United States, but rather that it empowers a small set of elites - some new, but most familiar.
Download or read book The Myth of Race written by Robert Wald Sussman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biological races do not exist—and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned “Aryans,” as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization—policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas’s new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why—when it comes to race—too many people still mistake bigotry for science.
Download or read book A More Beautiful and Terrible History written by Jeanne Theoharis and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is “a bracing corrective to a national mythology” (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a “helpmate” but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband’s activism in these directions. Moving from “the histories we get” to “the histories we need,” Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and “polite racism” in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice—which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared. By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done. Winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction
Download or read book The Myth of Disenchantment written by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
