1 - 5 of 5
Number of results to display per page
Search Results
2. Human Security: Undermining Human Rights?
- Author:
- Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
- Publication Date:
- 01-2011
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Human Rights Human Welfare (University of Denver)
- Abstract:
- This paper warns that the human security discourse and agenda could inadvertently undermine the international human rights regime. It argues that in so far as human security identifies new threats to well-being, new victims of those threats, new duties of states, and/or new mechanisms of dealing with threats at the inter-state level, it adds to the established human rights regime. In so far as it simply rephrases human rights principles without identifying new threats, victims, duty-bearers, or mechanisms, at best it complements human rights and at worst it could undermine them. The narrow view of human security, as defined below, is a valuable addition to the international normative regime requiring state and international action against severe threats to human beings. By contrast, the broader view of human security at best repeats, and possibly undermines, the already extant human rights regime, especially by converting state obligations to respect individuals' inalienable human rights into policy decisions regarding which aspects of human security to protect under which circumstances. The two may be competing discourses, despite arguments by some scholars (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007, 12) that they are not.
- Topic:
- Conflict Prevention, Security, Human Rights, Human Welfare, and Sovereignty
3. Germany, Afterwards
- Author:
- Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
- 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:
- Do human rights scholars need to learn more about the minutiae of the Nazi period, or the immediate post-war period? One wonders whether there is any benefit, other than one of historical interest, to learning about the way African-American soldiers and their children with white German women were treated under the American occupation of Germany. Similarly, one might wonder whether the study of continued German and American Catholic anti-Semitism after 1945 can be of any benefit, when the largest question concerning Jews in the 21st century is the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Moreover, in an age when mass rape in warfare is common, it may be mere prurience to read about mass rapes of German women by Russian soldiers. And since the fall of the Berlin Wall, do we need to know that East German Communists were often as corrupt as their Nazi predecessors?
- Topic:
- Civil Society and Peace Studies
- Political Geography:
- Africa, America, Europe, Palestine, and Germany
4. Moral Integrity and Reparations to Africa
- Author:
- Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
- Publication Date:
- 01-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
- Abstract:
- This paper presents some very preliminary thoughts on reparations due to Sub-Saharan Africa, including acknowledgment, apology, and financial compensation. I am a political sociologist, a specialist in international human rights with a background in African studies. Focusing on the Afactual@ history of Africa, I consider the possibility of arguing a case for Western compensation for racial discrimination. I also consider the case for acknowledgment, apology and compensation drawn from the need to recognize the moral integrity of Africans.
- Topic:
- Globalization and Imperialism
- Political Geography:
- Africa
5. Identity, Empathy and International Relations
- Author:
- Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
- Publication Date:
- 03-2000
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
- Abstract:
- The insertion of identity politics into international relations undermines the capacity for cosmopolitan empathy, a capacity that might be useful in ameliorating some of the world's social problems. Empathy is the capacity to put oneself into another's shoes and recognize a stranger's humanity. The useful post-modern stress on the mutability of identity has hardened in identity politics into the creation of exclusive social categories of Oppressed and Oppressor. The social creation of such categories through such devices as the politics of amnesia paves the way for isolationist indifference. Yet data drawn both from the sociology of genocide and from the author's own research shows that humanitarian empathy across lines of identity is possible.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Civil Society, and Imperialism