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Begin New Search Journal Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays

1. Hannah Arendt in a Global Age: Political Evil and International Theory

Author:
Matthew S. Weinert
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
While justifying an Allied alliance with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin during World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill quipped publicly that “if Hitler were to invade Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” The logic echoes prior calculations of the “lesser of two evils” principle: Liever Turks dan Paaps (“better a Turk than a Papist”), the rallying cry of the Dutch during their sixteenth to seventeenth century revolt against Spanish absolutism, was an adaptation of an earlier Christian adage heard in the Balkans—“Better the turban than the mitre”—when faced with imperial Ottoman expansion.
Political Geography:
Soviet Union

2. Measuring Human Rights: A Review Essay

Author:
David L. Richards
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
As a response to an emergent quantitatively-oriented research program over the past three decades investigating which human rights are respected/violated and why, there has been a growth in the number and sophistication of measures used to benchmark both overall human rights conditions and the human rights practices of governments. In Measuring Human Rights, Todd Landman and Edzia Carvalho provide a succinct and thoughtful introduction to the endeavor of human rights measurement.
Topic:
Human Rights

3. International Organization and Poverty Alleviation

Author:
William Felice and Diana Fuguitt
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Under the leadership of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and former High Commissioner of Human Rights Mary Robinson, efforts were made to mainstream human rights throughout the entire U.N. system. Annan appealed to all U.N. specialized agencies and affiliated organizations to consider how their work was linked to the corpus of internationally recognized human rights in international law. In one of his last acts as Secretary-General, Annan called for basing new reforms at the U.N. on three notions of freedom: freedom from want, freedom from fear, and freedom to live a life with dignity (Annan 2005).
Topic:
Human Rights
Political Geography:
United Nations

4. Remembering the Past and Struggling for Justice: The Contested Legacy of Authoritarian Rule in Chile

Author:
Rebecca Evans
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Chile holds special significance for scholars. Not only was it the first country to democratically elect a Marxist president who sought to lead a peaceful transition to socialism, it was also a prominent example of democratic breakdown and brutal military rule. The Chilean dictatorship not only practiced the terrible techniques that became part of Latin American “dirty war” campaigns, it also took a lead role in planning assassinations and coordinating intelligence operations with security agencies from other military dictatorships in the Southern Cone. In the early 1990s, Chile exemplified a more general trend to accept immunity as the price of social peace. By the end of the decade, however, Chile signaled another trend: a new willingness to push for legal accountability by holding regime officials criminally liable for human rights abuses committed under their rule. With Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998, Chile offered another first: the first legal ruling against a former head of state for violating international human rights law. Chile therefore serves as an important case of democratic breakdown, redemocratization, and transitional justice.
Political Geography:
London

5. Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973-1988. Vol. 2 of The Memory Box of Pinochet's Chile

Author:
Steven J. Stern
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Chile holds special significance for scholars. Not only was it the first country to democratically elect a Marxist president who sought to lead a peaceful transition to socialism, it was also a prominent example of democratic breakdown and brutal military rule. The Chilean dictatorship not only practiced the terrible techniques that became part of Latin American “ dirty war ” campaigns, it also took a lead role in planning assassinations and coordinating intelligence operations with security agencies from other military dictatorships in the Southern Cone. In the early 1990s, Chile exemplified a more general trend to accept immunity as the price of social peace. By the end of the decade, however, Chile signaled another trend: a new willingness to push for legal accountability by holding regime officials criminally liable for human rights abuses committed under their rule. With Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998, Chile offered another first: the first legal ruling against a former head of state for violating international human rights law. Chile therefore serves as an important case of democratic breakdown, redemocratization, and transitional justice.
Political Geography:
Latin America and Chile

6. Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998. Vol. 1 of The Memory Box of Pinochet's Chile

Author:
Steven J. Stern
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Chile holds special significance for scholars. Not only was it the first country to democratically elect a Marxist president who sought to lead a peaceful transition to socialism, it was also a prominent example of democratic breakdown and brutal military rule. The Chilean dictatorship not only practiced the terrible techniques that became part of Latin American “ dirty war ” campaigns, it also took a lead role in planning assassinations and coordinating intelligence operations with security agencies from other military dictatorships in the Southern Cone. In the early 1990s, Chile exemplified a more general trend to accept immunity as the price of social peace. By the end of the decade, however, Chile signaled another trend: a new willingness to push for legal accountability by holding regime officials criminally liable for human rights abuses committed under their rule. With Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998, Chile offered another first: the first legal ruling against a former head of state for violating international human rights law. Chile therefore serves as an important case of democratic breakdown, redemocratization, and transitional justice.
Political Geography:
London and Chile

7. The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights

Author:
Naomi Roht-Arriaza
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Chile holds special significance for scholars. Not only was it the first country to democratically elect a Marxist president who sought to lead a peaceful transition to socialism, it was also a prominent example of democratic breakdown and brutal military rule. The Chilean dictatorship not only practiced the terrible techniques that became part of Latin American “ dirty war ” campaigns, it also took a lead role in planning assassinations and coordinating intelligence operations with security agencies from other military dictatorships in the Southern Cone. In the early 1990s, Chile exemplified a more general trend to accept immunity as the price of social peace. By the end of the decade, however, Chile signaled another trend: a new willingness to push for legal accountability by holding regime officials criminally liable for human rights abuses committed under their rule. With Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998, Chile offered another first: the first legal ruling against a former head of state for violating international human rights law. Chile therefore serves as an important case of democratic breakdown, redemocratization, and transitional justice.
Political Geography:
Latin America and Chile

8. "Revolution by Eradication:" On the Khmer Rouge's Making of the Tragedy of Cambodia

Author:
Matthew Weinert
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Terminologically, genocide refers to the extermination of a gens, a people. Since Rafael Lemkin coined the term in 1948, scholars have focused on its unfortunate instances, perpetrators, victims, causes, and the legal machinery to punish those who commit it. Given the conventional emphasis of genocide—the obliteration of a nationally, ethnically, racially, or religiously defined people—James Tyner's The Killing of Cambodia makes a rather striking appearance on the bookshelf, for its gaze turns toward genocide's geographic dimensions. While many book-length accounts of the genocide have been published, Tyner's is the first to explore “the geopolitical discourses, the narratives and 'spatial logics' that support, justify, and legitimate mass killings” (Tyner: 3). If geography is in part about the writing of space, then Tyner alerts us to the possibility that geography should also focus on the erasure of space. In the case of Cambodia, terracide was the complement to genocide.
Political Geography:
Cambodia

9. Rights Interests: Trade Disputes

Author:
Howard Guille
Publication Date:
06-2010
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 global financial crisis led to the steepest drop in global activity and trade since World War II (International Monetary Fund 2009c). Recession means unemployment of people and resources. It is a bad time to be a worker and a despondent one for worker representatives. The crisis began, publicly at least, with financial panics and ensuing bank failures in the United States in September 2008. The financial bubble of securities and derivatives burst because of “the obesity of banks and shadow banks” (Johnson 2009). However, politicians and governments had given bankers and financiers a license for excess by deregulating finance and trusting open markets. In essence, elected politicians gave small government to bankers, who in turn gave neo-liberal globalization to us.
Topic:
Globalization, Government, War, and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United States

10. Is the Wedding of Trade and Human Rights a Marriage of Convenience or a Lasting Union?

Author:
Susan Ariel Aaronson
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Where many see trade policies and agreements as undermining human rights, Emilie Hafner- Burton takes a contrarian and more optimistic view. Her provocative and well-written book, Forced to Be Good: Why Trade Agreements Boost Human Rights, is based on years of qualitative and empirical analysis of the marriage of trade agreements and human rights. She shows that, rather than undermining human rights, Americans and Europeans have developed “mutually binding trade agreements that safeguard people's rights and even impose penalties for violations” (2). Moreover, Hafner-Burton provides an illuminating analysis as to why developing countries might accept increased human rights conditionality. She concludes that acceptance of human rights conditionality illustrates an “extraordinary political conversion in the way governments manage trade”.
Topic:
Human Rights
Political Geography:
America and Europe