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1. When Should Children Be Allowed to Work?

Author:
Lorenza Belinda Fontana
Publication Date:
02-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
When we think about child labor, what often comes to mind are images of dirty, poorly dressed children—digging in mountains of trash, carrying heavy loads of bricks or crops, or disappearing in dark mine tunnels. Yet working children are a heterogeneous group that also includes children helping out in domestic labor, family shops, or subsistence agriculture, and adolescents undertaking their first steps into the labor market. While child labor is generally perceived as bad for children and efforts toward its elimination are pursued by the international communities, in certain contexts—and particularly in countries of the Global South—this is a culturally accepted and sometimes prized practice, considered fundamental for basic household production. In certain countries, working children themselves have created unions and mobilized to ask for fairer labor conditions and greater protections rather than child labor elimination. These gaps between international and domestic views on child labor have made the task of regulating the issue under human rights law particularly challenging for international organizations. International human rights agreements have proliferated since the 1990s. They seek to encourage states to behave in ways that respect human rights and they play a major role in shaping ideas about how to conduct world politics. But despite their proliferation, we still have an incomplete understanding of how states respond to internationally agreed-upon charters of rights, why they respond the way they do, the circumstances under which rights treaties make a difference, and what that difference might be. Compliance tends to be understood in this debate in an either/or fashion: states either come into line with international human rights law or not. Legal anthropology and constructivist approaches to international relations sought to document the ‘translation’ or ‘socialization’ of human rights that shapes domestic compliance—by which they mean how international norms become attached to local issues that allow communities to ‘make sense’ of the norm—but they have not challenged the assumption that ‘compliance’ implies an alignment between domestic practices and international agreements.
Topic:
Human Rights, United Nations, Labor Issues, and Children
Political Geography:
Global South

2. Grassroots Reform in the Global South: A Literature Review on Grassroots Reform

Author:
Patrick Heller, Andrew Schrank, Anindita Adhikari, Benjamin Bradlow, Rehan Jamil, Kristine Li, Chantel Pheiffer, and Marcus Walton
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute of International Education
Abstract:
In 2016, USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance launched its Learning Agenda—a set of research questions designed to address the issues that confront staff in USAID field offices working on the intersection of development and democracy, human rights, and governance. This literature review—produced by a team of sociologists and political scientists—synthesizes scholarship from diverse research traditions on the following Learning Agenda question: How and when does grassroots reform scale up? When citizen participation has led to local reforms in a particular sector (e.g., health), what processes lead to these reforms’ influencing the regional or national levels of that sector (e.g., citizen groups monitoring medicine supplies in local clinics leads eventually to pharmaceutical procurement reform in the Ministry of Health)? The report itself is divided into four principal sections: Section 1 outlines the context for the report by discussing the importance of grassroots reform, defining key terms, and describing its methodology. Section 2 documents the experiences of different regions with an eye toward intra-regional comparisons. Section 3 distills two types of lessons from the regional experiences: relatively abstract lessons of broad relevance and relatively precise lessons of less general relevance. Section 4 discusses the translation of the authors’ findings into actionable lessons and concludes by discussing the limits to their knowledge base, pending research questions, and methodological impediments to their resolution.
Topic:
Human Rights, Reform, Democracy, and USAID
Political Geography:
United States of America and Global South

3. Violence and Insecurity: The Challenge in the Global South

Author:
Diane E. Davis
Publication Date:
11-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
MIT Center for International Studies
Abstract:
It does not seem that long ago that optimism flowered about prospects for Democracy and sustained economic development on a worldwide scale. But hopes for the future have dimmed over the last several years, as problems of violence, crime, and insecurity have emerged with a vengeance in many parts of the global south. Forget big ideas about democracy; forget the aspirations for a globally competitive development strategy. Growing numbers of citizens in the global south are turning to demands for basic needs and human rights, as reflected in the accelerating desire for security and a life without violent conflict.
Topic:
Development, Human Rights, Democracy, and Conflict
Political Geography:
Global South