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Begin New Search Political Geography Europe Publishing Institution Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver

1. 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

2. Memory and Violence in Israel/Palestine

Author:
K.M. Fierke
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:
In 2008, Israel will turn sixty. Landmark birthdays often give rise to reflection on the past. In this case, questions about memory, and whose memory to privilege or commemorate, may have consequences for the future of the region. For the Israelis, the object of memory, and the vehicle of its birth, was the 1948 “War of Independence,” where like David and Goliath, a numerically smaller but technologically and culturally superior power, faced down a larger but inferior one. Following just a few years after the Holocaust in Europe, Israel's military victory offered, in the words of Nahum Goldman, an American Zionist leader, “a glorious contrast to the centuries of persecution and humiliation, of adaptation and compromise” (Shlaim 2000: 40). For Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, the Israeli narrative is not merely offensive but a source of humiliation itself, given the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians that occurred during al Nakba (the Catastrophe), with the dispossession of over 750,000 indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and their descendents. For Palestinians, the failure of the Israeli state to ac knowledge 1948 as an ethnic cleansing continues to underpin the conflict.
Political Geography:
America, Europe, Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

3. Rights and the Hijâb: Rationality and Discourse in the Public Sphere

Author:
Howard Adelman
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:
When I took my family to France for one of the hottest summers on record, we went to a local municipal pool in Beaune. After paying the en trance fee and entering the pool area, we were informed that my children would not be allowed to swim wearing their North American boxer-style swimming shorts. “Public health” required that they wear speedo-type suits. No reason or evidence was offered to explain the policy. The officials simply said it was French law. The swimming pool administration generously provided washed speedos. My children had a great time. The next day, my youngest son developed an itch in his crotch. When we took him to the doctor, he was diagnosed with a serious skin infection most likely contracted from the borrowed swim suit.
Topic:
Civil Society, Islam, and Nationalism
Political Geography:
Europe, France, and North America

4. 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