Download or read book The Human Rights Paradox written by Steve J. Stern and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights are paradoxical. Advocates across the world invoke the idea that such rights belong to all people, no matter who or where they are. But since humans can only realize their rights in particular places, human rights are both always and never universal. The Human Rights Paradox is the first book to fully embrace this contradiction and reframe human rights as history, contemporary social advocacy, and future prospect. In case studies that span Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and the United States, contributors carefully illuminate how social actors create the imperative of human rights through relationships whose entanglements of the global and the local are so profound that one cannot exist apart from the other. These chapters provocatively analyze emerging twenty-first-century horizons of human rights—on one hand, the simultaneous promise and peril of global rights activism through social media, and on the other, the force of intergenerational rights linked to environmental concerns that are both local and global. Taken together, they demonstrate how local struggles and realities transform classic human rights concepts, including “victim,” “truth,” and “justice.” Edited by Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus, The Human Rights Paradox enables us to consider the consequences—for history, social analysis, politics, and advocacy—of understanding that human rights belong both to “humanity” as abstraction as well as to specific people rooted in particular locales.

Download or read book The Human Rights Paradox written by Steve J. Stern and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights are paradoxical. Advocates across the world invoke the idea that such rights belong to all people, no matter who or where they are. But since humans can only realize their rights in particular places, human rights are both always and never universal. The Human Rights Paradox is the first book to fully embrace this contradiction and reframe human rights as history, contemporary social advocacy, and future prospect. In case studies that span Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and the United States, contributors carefully illuminate how social actors create the imperative of human rights through relationships whose entanglements of the global and the local are so profound that one cannot exist apart from the other. These chapters provocatively analyze emerging twenty-first-century horizons of human rights—on one hand, the simultaneous promise and peril of global rights activism through social media, and on the other, the force of intergenerational rights linked to environmental concerns that are both local and global. Taken together, they demonstrate how local struggles and realities transform classic human rights concepts, including “victim,” “truth,” and “justice.” Edited by Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus, The Human Rights Paradox enables us to consider the consequences—for history, social analysis, politics, and advocacy—of understanding that human rights belong both to “humanity” as abstraction as well as to specific people rooted in particular locales.

Download or read book The Human Paradox written by Ralph Heintzman and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a human being? What does it mean to be human? How can you lead your life in ways that best fulfil your own nature? In The Human Paradox, Ralph Heintzman explores these vital questions and offers an exciting new vision of the nature of the human. The Human Paradox aims to counter or correct several contemporary assumptions about the nature of the human, especially the tendency of Western culture, since the seventeenth century, to identify the human with rationality and the rational mind. Using the lens of the virtues, The Human Paradox shows how rediscovering the nature of the human can help not just to understand one’s own paradoxical nature but to act in ways that are more consistent with its full reality. Offering accessible insight from both traditional and contemporary thought, The Human Paradox shows how a fuller, richer vision of the human can help address urgent contemporary problems, including the challenges of cultural and religious diversity, human migration and human rights, the role of the market, artificial intelligence, the future of democracy, and global climate change. This fresh perspective on the Western past will guide readers into what it means to be human and open new possibilities for the future.

Download or read book The Goodness Paradox written by Richard W. Wrangham and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2019 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Highly accessible, authoritative, and intellectually provocative, a startlingly original theory of how Homo sapiens came to be: Richard Wrangham forcefully argues that, a quarter of a million years ago, rising intelligence among our ancestors led to a unique new ability with unexpected consequences: our ancestors invented socially sanctioned capital punishment, facilitating domestication, increased cooperation, the accumulation of culture, and ultimately the rise of civilization itself. Throughout history even as quotidian life has exhibited calm and tolerance[,] war has never been far away, and even within societies violence can be a threat. The Goodness Paradox gives a new and powerful argument for how and why this uncanny combination of peacefulness and violence crystallized after our ancestors acquired language in Africa a quarter of a million years ago. Words allowed the sharing of intentions that enabled men effectively to coordinate their actions. Verbal conspiracies paved the way for planned conflicts and, most importantly, for the uniquely human act of capital punishment. The victims of capital punishment tended to be aggressive men, and as their genes waned, our ancestors became tamer. This ancient form of systemic violence was critical, not only encouraging cooperation in peace and war and in culture, but also for making us who we are: Homo sapiens"--

Download or read book The Human Rights Turn and the Paradox of Progress in the Middle East written by Mishana Hosseinioun and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-11 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to shift the limited and often negative popular understanding of the Middle East’s place in the world by chronicling the region’s contributions to the international order rather than disorder, and to the development of the international human rights system. It elucidates the many paradoxes that make the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region both a troubling place and also a region brimming with great potential for peace, prosperity and progress. By demonstrating the paradox of human rights progress amid regress, the book tells a radically new and more hopeful side of the story of the region that has largely been obfuscated and omitted from the chronicles of history. In so doing, it shows that fostering a human rights culture is not only possible for all universally, it is inevitable.

Download or read book The Ostrich Paradox written by Robert Meyer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Ostrich Paradox boldly addresses a key question of our time: Why are we humans so poor at dealing with disastrous risks, and what can we humans do about it? It is a must-read for everyone who cares about risk." —Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow We fail to evacuate when advised. We rebuild in flood zones. We don't wear helmets. We fail to purchase insurance. We would rather avoid the risk of "crying wolf" than sound an alarm. Our ability to foresee and protect against natural catastrophes has never been greater; yet, we consistently fail to heed the warnings and protect ourselves and our communities, with devastating consequences. What explains this contradiction? In The Ostrich Paradox, Wharton professors Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther draw on years of teaching and research to explain why disaster preparedness efforts consistently fall short. Filled with heartbreaking stories of loss and resilience, the book addresses: •How people make decisions when confronted with high-consequence, low-probability events—and how these decisions can go awry •The 6 biases that lead individuals, communities, and institutions to make grave errors that cost lives •The Behavioral Risk Audit, a systematic approach for improving preparedness by recognizing these biases and designing strategies that anticipate them •Why, if we are to be better prepared for disasters, we need to learn to be more like ostriches, not less Fast-reading and critically important, The Ostrich Paradox is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why we consistently underprepare for disasters, as well as private and public leaders, planners, and policy-makers who want to build more prepared communities.

Download or read book The Paradox of Human Rights written by Costas Douzinas and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Story Paradox written by Jonathan Gottschall and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may soon destroy it Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it. In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. The results challenge the idea that storytelling is an obvious force for good in human life. Yes, storytelling can bind groups together, but it is also the main force dragging people apart. And it’s the best method we’ve ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. Behind all civilization’s greatest ills—environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare—you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story. Gottschall argues that societies succeed or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. And it has only become harder, as new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible. With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”

Download or read book Paradox and Promise in Human Rights written by Peggy Billings and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book On Paradox written by Elizabeth S. Anker and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In On Paradox literary and legal scholar Elizabeth S. Anker contends that faith in the logic of paradox has been the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century. She attributes the ubiquity of paradox in the humanities to its appeal as an incisive tool for exposing and dismantling hierarchies. Tracing the ascent of paradox in theories of modernity, in rights discourse, in the history of literary criticism and the linguistic turn, and in the transformation of the liberal arts in higher education, Anker suggests that paradox not only generates the very exclusions it critiques but also creates a disempowering haze of indecision. She shows that reasoning through paradox has become deeply problematic: it engrains a startling homogeneity of thought while undercutting the commitment to social justice that remains a guiding imperative of theory. Rather than calling for a wholesale abandonment of such reasoning, Anker argues for an expanded, diversified theory toolkit that can help theorists escape the seductions and traps of paradox.

Download or read book Not Enough written by Samuel Moyn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, market fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant force in national and global economies. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn analyzes how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice. In a pioneering history of rights stretching back to the Bible, Not Enough charts how twentieth-century welfare states, concerned about both abject poverty and soaring wealth, resolved to fulfill their citizens’ most basic needs without forgetting to contain how much the rich could tower over the rest. In the wake of two world wars and the collapse of empires, new states tried to take welfare beyond its original European and American homelands and went so far as to challenge inequality on a global scale. But their plans were foiled as a neoliberal faith in markets triumphed instead. Moyn places the career of the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift from the egalitarian politics of yesterday to the neoliberal globalization of today. Exploring why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and exploding inequality, and why activists came to seek remedies for indigence without challenging wealth, Not Enough calls for more ambitious ideals and movements to achieve a humane and equitable world.

Download or read book Intellectual Property and Human Rights written by F. W. Grosheide and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . . . very refreshing. . . a valuable contribution to the debate. European Intellectual Property Review The collection of articles makes a valuable contribution to current debates on these critically important issues by providing a range of views on the human rights implications of intellectual property law and policy. Madhu Sahni, Journal of Intellectual Property Rights Gathering together essays by leading commentators, Professor Willem Grosheide s timely book offers an excellent overview of the many significant questions of social and legal policy that emerge at interface between intellectual property and human rights. . . Providing a range of views on the human rights implications of intellectual property law and policy, this collection makes a valuable contribution to current debates on these critically important issues. Graeme Austin, University of Arizona, US In the modern era where the rise of the knowledge economy is accompanied, if not facilitated, by an ever-expanding use of intellectual property rights, this timely book provides a much needed explanation to the relationship between intellectual property law and human rights law. The contributors promote the view that this relationship should be central to the analysis of many of the profound problems that nation states and the international community encounter today, be they scientific, technological or cultural. The book is divided into sections covering the law and its trends, IP rights as human rights and human rights as restrictions to IP rights. This stimulating book will appeal to academics, postgraduate students, national and international public authorities and those involved with international organizations in the fields of intellectual property law and human rights law.

Download or read book The Indigenous Paradox written by Jonas Bens and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into how indigenous rights are conceived in legal language and doctrine In the twenty-first century, it is politically and legally commonplace that indigenous communities go to court to assert their rights against the postcolonial nation-state in which they reside. But upon closer examination, this constellation is far from straightforward. Indigenous communities make their claims as independent entities, governed by their own laws. And yet, they bring a case before the court of another sovereign, subjecting themselves to its foreign rule of law. According to Jonas Bens, when native communities enter into legal relationships with postcolonial nation-states, they "become indigenous." Indigenous communities define themselves as separated from the settler nation-state and insist that their rights originate from within their own system of laws. At the same time, indigenous communities must argue that they are incorporated in the settler nation-state to be able to use its judiciary to enforce these rights. As such, they are simultaneously included into and excluded from the state. Tracing how the indigenous paradox is inscribed into the law by investigating several indigenous rights cases in the Americas, from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, Bens illustrates how indigenous communities have managed—and continue to manage—to navigate this paradox by developing lines of legal reasoning that mobilize the concepts of sovereignty and culture. Bens argues that understanding indigeneity as a paradoxical formation sheds light on pressing questions concerning the role of legal pluralism and shared sovereignty in contemporary multicultural societies.

Download or read book The End of Human Rights written by Costas Douzinas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The introduction of the Human Rights Act has led to an explosion in books on human rights, yet no sustained examination of their history and philosophy exists in the burgeoning literature. At the same time, while human rights have triumphed on the world stage as the ideology of postmodernity, our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous, less enlightened one. This book fills the historical and theoretical gap and explores the powerful promises and disturbing paradoxes of human rights. Divided in two parts and fourteen chapters, the book offers first an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights represent the eternal human struggle to resist domination and oppression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded or despised. At the time of their birth, in the 18th century, and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of the conservatism of law. But the radical energy, symbolic value and apparently endless expansive potential of rights has led to their adoption both by governments wishing to justify their policies on moral grounds and by individuals fighting for the public recognition of private desires and has undermined their ends. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. Rights, the most liberal of institutions, has been largely misunderstood by established political philosophy and jurisprudence as a result of their cognitive limitations and ethically impoverished views of the individual subject and of the social bond. The liberal approaches of Hobbes, Locke and Kant are juxtaposed to the classical critiques of the concept of human rights by Burke, Hegel and Marx. The philosophies of Heidegger, Strauss, Arendt and Sartre are used to deconstruct the concept of the (legal) subject. Semiotics and psychoanalysis help explore the catastrophic consequences of both universalists and cultural relativists when they become convinced about their correctness. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a position of moral transcendence. This is a comprehensive historical and theoretical examination of the discourse and practice of human rights. Using examples from recent moral foreign policies in Iraq, Rwanda and Kosovo, Douzinas radically argues that the defensive and emancipatory role of human rights will come to an end if we do not re-invent their utopian ideal.

Download or read book Condemned to Repeat written by Fiona Terry and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanitarian groups have failed, Fiona Terry believes, to face up to the core paradox of their activity: humanitarian action aims to alleviate suffering, but by inadvertently sustaining conflict it potentially prolongs suffering. In Condemned to Repeat?, Terry examines the side-effects of intervention by aid organizations and points out the need to acknowledge the political consequences of the choice to give aid. The author makes the controversial claim that aid agencies act as though the initial decision to supply aid satisfies any need for ethical discussion and are often blind to the moral quandaries of aid. Terry focuses on four historically relevant cases: Rwandan camps in Zaire, Afghan camps in Pakistan, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan camps in Honduras, and Cambodian camps in Thailand. Terry was the head of the French section of Medecins sans frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) when it withdrew from the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire because aid intended for refugees actually strengthened those responsible for perpetrating genocide. This book contains documents from the former Rwandan army and government that were found in the refugee camps after they were attacked in late 1996. This material illustrates how combatants manipulate humanitarian action to their benefit. Condemned to Repeat? makes clear that the paradox of aid demands immediate attention by organizations and governments around the world. The author stresses that, if international agencies are to meet the needs of populations in crisis, their organizational behavior must adjust to the wider political and socioeconomic contexts in which aid occurs.

Download or read book The Hidden Face of Rights written by Kathryn Sikkink and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why we cannot truly implement human rights unless we also recognize human responsibilities When we debate questions in international law, politics, and justice, we often use the language of rights—and far less often the language of responsibilities. Human rights scholars and activists talk about state responsibility for rights, but they do not articulate clear norms about other actors’ obligations. In this book, Kathryn Sikkink argues that we cannot truly implement human rights unless we also recognize and practice the corresponding human responsibilities. Focusing on five areas—climate change, voting, digital privacy, freedom of speech, and sexual assault—where on-the-ground (primarily university campus) initiatives have persuaded people to embrace a close relationship between rights and responsibilities, Sikkink argues for the importance of responsibilities to any comprehensive understanding of political ethics and human rights.

Download or read book Democracy and Goodness written by John R. Wallach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes a new democratic theory, rooted in activity not consent, and intrinsically related to historical understandings of power and ethics.