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Begin New Search Journal Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays Publishing Institution Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver

11. Tom Farer's Liberal World Order: A Realist Utopia

Author:
Richard Falk
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Reading Tom Farer's challenging and eloquent Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism evoked two persistent reactions. The first, and foremost, was the reminder of my long unfulfilled wish that the U.S. was a country where the “liberal” presidential candidate of the Democratic Party would have the courage and clarity of mind and heart to rely on someone with Farer's deep understanding of how to (re)shape American foreign policy in the early twenty-first century rather than turn the job over to those tired “old hands” that might improve things by five percent, but not by much more. (even the word liberal is now disfavored by liberals in public discourse almost as much as the taboo word “socialist,” the former having been effectively discredited by George H.W. Bush two decades ago; the rhetorical preference in general discussion has shifted to “progressive,” but I will stick with liberal here taking advantage of the greater latitude of academic discourse). It is not actually an indictment of any particular individual, and certainly not Barack Obama, but rather the constraints of a climate of public opinion, reinforced by media gurus and special interests, that restrict the roster of credible candidates for high elective office in the United States to those who quibble at the margins, while affirming the consensus verities however discredited and bereft of any basis for the necessary drastic modifications of future policy. To his credit, Farer does not shy away from such disqualifying affirmations so as to keep alive the chance he might be called upon to play a prominent role in the future making of American foreign policy. On the contrary, he practices his form of controversial truth-telling with vivid prose, disarming wit, lucid and persuasive reasoning, an unflagging respect for evidence, as well as an engaging willingness to push provocatively the hottest red button issues.
Topic:
Terrorism
Political Geography:
United States

12. A Symposium on Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy

Author:
Richard Falk, Tom Farer, Dino Kritsiotis, and Paul Taylor
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Reading Tom Farer's challenging and eloquent Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism evoked two persistent reactions. The first, and foremost, was the reminder of my long unfulfilled wish that the U.S. was a country where the “liberal” presidential candidate of the Democratic Party would have the courage and clarity of mind and heart to rely on someone with Farer's deep understanding of how to (re)shape American foreign policy in the early twenty-first century rather than turn the job over to those tired “old hands” that might improve things by five percent, but not by much more. (even the word liberal is now disfavored by liberals in public discourse almost as much as the taboo word “socialist,” the former having been effectively discredited by George H.W. Bush two decades ago; the rhetorical preference in general discussion has shifted to “progressive,” but I will stick with liberal here taking advantage of the greater latitude of academic discourse). It is not actually an indictment of any particular individual, and certainly not Barack Obama, but rather the constraints of a climate of public opinion, reinforced by media gurus and special interests, that restrict the roster of credible candidates for high elective office in the United States to those who quibble at the margins, while affirming the consensus verities however discredited and bereft of any basis for the necessary drastic modifications of future policy. To his credit, Farer does not shy away from such disqualifying affirmations so as to keep alive the chance he might be called upon to play a prominent role in the future making of American foreign policy. On the contrary, he practices his form of controversial truth-telling with vivid prose, disarming wit, lucid and persuasive reasoning, an unflagging respect for evidence, as well as an engaging willingness to push provocatively the hottest red button issues.
Topic:
Public Opinion
Political Geography:
United States

13. The War on Terror and the Problematique of the War Paradigm

Author:
Dino Kritsiotis
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
This volume is not for the faint-of-heart. In Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo- Conservatism: The Framework of A Liberal Grand Strategy (2008), Tom Farer reaches deep into psyche and soul of “a nation's humanistic culture” (79),1 and examines the “fateful decision” of the Bush Administration after September 11, 2001, “to pursue its ends unconstrained by conventional interpretations of the applicable law” (82). He argues that “it would strain credulity if someone suggested that [the torture memoranda] were spontaneously generated by mid-level officials” and locates the heart of decision-making in the White House of the Bush Administration who, Farer writes, “requested legal advice both to determine the limits imposed by acts of Congress and the risk of criminal liability particularly for persons not in a position to deny responsibility if they went outside statutory law and their actions became public” (85). There is no mincing of words here, no recoiling from the charges or criticisms made, and it is a process that comes with its unflattering and hard-hitting historical parallels (64). Yet, it is also the case that a strong sense takes hold in Confronting Global Terrorism that the path trodden by the United States in these years need not have been so—that this particular democracy need not have compromised its moral standing and its authority, or its commitment to the rule of law.
Topic:
Terrorism
Political Geography:
United States

14. Tom Farer's Crisis of U.S. Liberalism

Author:
Paul Taylor
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Confronting Global Terrorism is an account of the agenda for dealing with terrorism as it faces a concerned liberal in the early twenty-first century. The response to the appearance of terrorism, and the role of the U.S. Neo-Conservatives (Neocons) in determining how this response was made, and how badly, correctly heads the list of agenda items for Farer. But it is also necessary to deal with some of the other causes of the increasing problem of terrorism. One problem is that of how to deal with minorities in developed democracies—not much more to be said on this in these comments, except that Farer's judgments are profound and absolutely correct. Another is the problem of the Middle East, which must be seen as being at the core of the problems surrounding global terrorism facing us all, including the Neocons. Farer has produced a profound and courageous chapter on Palestinian-Israeli relations, since what he has to say is bound to irritate the more blinkered pro-Israelis in the U.S. For them, it should be required reading. The points made seem incontestable: that the balance of guilt for the awful situation is at least as much that of the Israelis as the Palestinians, and that there can be no solution unless Israel returns to the pre-1967 frontiers and accepts the internationalization of Jerusalem. All of this is backed up with detailed evidence and strong legal argument. I doubt, however, whether the Neocons will be persuaded.
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

15. A Response

Author:
Tom Farer
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
All thinking about neuralgic issues of public policy is work in infinite progress. Lacking inductive or deductive means for achieving certainty about cause and effect, our diagnoses and prescriptions are, by their nature, hypotheses shaped by a highly subjective (partially unconscious) interpretation of history and by an intuitively normative (or perhaps it is more akin to aesthetic) preference. Even if, despite being blinkered by unavoidable preconceptions, we manage through a feat of imaginative analysis, to assemble all of the relevant parts of a problem, there is no protocol for assigning relative weights to them. After all the plodding cerebration come leaps of intuition.

16. Peace from Below: Recent Steps Taken along the Track-Two Diplomacy Path

Author:
Michael Thomas Kuchinsky
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Among the many emotional galleries at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, stands a series of tablets describing persons whose courage and compassion pushed them to conceal or save the lives of those hunted by the Nazi regime for extermination. The biographical displays end near the exit doors. Perhaps their placement suggests a purpose, or an interpretation: “Here were people of good will or faith whose conscience pricked them to act against a genuine evil and for a reconciled community.” “Here were some who did more good than harm.” “Here were prophetic voices who understood the urgency of the moment.” “Here were some who hoped in the midst of despair.” Or, “here were those whose visions for humanity were broader than mere power and violence, who believed in the possibilities of peace through human intervention.”
Topic:
Cold War
Political Geography:
United States

17. Reconciliation and the Therapeutic Impulse: What Does It Mean to "Heal"?

Author:
Elizabeth S. Dahl
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Healing is widely seen as an essential component of socio-political reconciliation, helping to promote a more peaceable future after violent conflict. At the same time, however, little is known about what exactly “healing” means to traumatized people and whether particular reconciliation efforts do indeed constitute healing. Instead, social healing is described usually in metaphorical terms, compared to the way an individual body heals, for example. This biomedical language is explored and connected to medical ethics as a way to broach these difficult issues and come to a more systematic understanding of healing processes.
Political Geography:
United States

18. Silhouettes of the Disappeared: Memory, Justice and Human Rights in Post- Authoritarian Argentina

Author:
Vincent Druliolle
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Soon after taking office in 2003, Argentine President Néstor Kirchner announced that the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (Navy School of Mechanics, or ESMA) in Buenos Aires, one of the most infamous torture centers of the last military dictatorship, the so-called “Proceso de Reorganización Nacional” (National Reorganization Process, 1976-1983), would be transformed into a museum of memory. On the occasion of the twenty-eighth anniversary of the military takeover, March 24, 2004, President Kirchner led a highly symbolic public event during which he and a range of social actors entered the premises of the ESMA where thousands of Argentines were taken clandestinely under the dictatorship and most of whom have since then been missing, thereby marking the re-appropriation of the past by the state and Argentine society. He was accompanied by the Commander of the Army, the representatives of the city of Buenos Aires, major human rights organizations, and associations of the relatives of the victims of the repression. In his speech, President Kirchner apologized to Argentine society for the failure to pursue justice and for preserving the memory of the last dictatorship. After signing the documents devolving ESMA to the city of Buenos Aires, the event culminated in the removal of the portrait of General Jorge Rafael Videla, the architect of the military takeover and first leader of the Junta, and of Reynaldo Bignone, its last leader, from the walls of the Colegio Militar by the President. Some days before this event, which may already be called a defining moment in Argentine history, human-sized silhouetted representations of the disappeared had been placed on the bars of the entrance of ESMA by the relatives of the disappeared, human rights organizations, and some artists as well as invited guests. The silhouettes have remained there since then. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the disappeared had returned to Argentine society, no longer as invisible traces haunting daily life, but as acknowledged absences. They have found a place and a role as the guardians of memory and as a source of the ethical commitment to the defense of human rights in post-authoritarian Argentina.
Political Geography:
Argentina

19. International Justice and International Politics: Intertwined Paths

Author:
David Penna
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
The end of July 2008 was marked by an unexpected event: the announcement of the spectacular arrest and transfer of Radovan Karadzic to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia by Serb authorities. Karadzic, slightly disguised, had led a life hiding in plain view and even making television appearances in his new personality. The transfer came thirteen years after Karadzic's indictment (“Karadzic Set to Make First Court Appearance” 2008). The arrest left two indicted war criminals from Yugoslavia (Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic) remaining at large and seemed to promise some prospect that the tribunal will have a high profile conviction before it closes its doors in 2010. This is especially compelling given Karadzic's claim that he was promised immunity by the United States for agreeing to the Dayton Accords and limiting his political activity in later years; the Court rejected that any immunity could be recognized under international law (ICTY 2009, para. 5). Was the arrest an indication that international justice had triumphed over international politics? The Court seems to accept a standard of international justice that demands respect for agreed upon international standards of humanitarian law or respect for victims' rights rather than political deals, even those guaranteed by great powers to end a conflict.
Topic:
Humanitarian Aid
Political Geography:
Yugoslavia

20. The Promise of Economic Rights and the Welfare State

Author:
Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat
Publication Date:
01-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
The International Bill of Rights, which includes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966), and the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966), embodies a wide range of human rights. The universalism, interdependency, and indivisibility of these rights have been reaffirmed at the World Conferences on Human Rights, organized by the United Nations (U.N.) and held in Teheran (1968) and Vienna (199 3), and in various U.N. resolutions. Yet, there has been resistance to accepting the full scope of human rights articulated in international documents, and civil and political rights have been privileged. Economic, social and labor rights tend to take a back seat in international discourse in many countries, including Western democratic states that often present themselves as the flagship of human rights.
Topic:
United Nations
Political Geography:
United States and Canada

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