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31. Response

Author:
Caitlin Hannahan
Publication Date:
02-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Professor Rebecca Cook's essay on the structures of discrimination tackles two common problems within Western human rights discourse. The first concerns the overwhelming scope of the concept of human rights whereas the second involves its perceived exoticism. In other words, the term human rights violations has degenerated into an umbrella phrase used to describe various crimes in other, far-reaching parts of the world. They are seen as disconnected and certainly unrelated to Western culture. Yet by making gender inequality a human rights issue, Cook identifies a problem that occurs in both the “West” and in the “Third World.” Secondly, by highlighting the cause of the perpetuation of gender inequality—namely stereotypes—she emphasizes a mode of thinking that is inherent in the individual. The result is a human rights violation that is both local and universal, and subsequently the responsibility of every individual on the planet. Gender inequality consequently becomes both a global and a local issue.
Topic:
Human Rights

32. Structures of Discrimination

Author:
Rebecca Cook
Publication Date:
02-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Significant strides have been made in many regions of the world in the improvement of women's status in the last half-century, but the challenges of achieving women's equality worldwide are hardly resolved and progress is not inexorable. We have to question why we still take steps forward and backward in bewildering alternation. Finding answers to this question requires us to address the various structures of discrimination that persist in our thinking, in our habits, and in our prejudices. The thesis of this essay is that, in order for women and men to be fully equal with each other, we need to understand the structures of discrimination against women; that is, the forms of the subordination of women that are deeply rooted in our thinking, our myths, and in our individual, institutional, and social ways of functioning.

33. International Criminal Justice: Growing Pains or Incurable Contradictions?

Author:
James von Geldern
Publication Date:
02-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
When the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was drafted in 1998, it represented a signal moment in the history of human rights. Here, finally, was a document that not only enunciated humanitarian protections, it also offered a means to punish individuals guilty of violating them. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the Statute “a gift of hope to future generations, and a giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law.” Drafting Committee Chairman Cherif Bassiouni stressed that the world would never again be the same. This was the last step of a history that had started at the end of the First World War and meant that impunity for the perpetrators of grave crimes of international concern was no longer tolerable. It would not eliminate all conflicts or bring victims back to life, but it would bring justice.
Topic:
Human Rights
Political Geography:
United Nations

34. Response

Author:
Paul Schadewald
Publication Date:
02-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Dr. James von Geldern is a public scholar, lawyer, teacher, and professor who raises questions with profound moral implications for international policy, activism, and human rights work. Von Geldern's argument that the Institutional Criminal Court (ICC) may be fatally flawed is disturbing for people who work for human rights, but it is also a critical line of inquiry. His argument is troubling because it does not engage us solely in an intellectual conundrum. The topics raised by his essay, such as whether universal global justice is ultimately possible, engages us in multiple ways. We enter the conversation as scholars, human rights workers and activists, and as human beings, who live with the recent images of Darfur and with memories and stories of other genocides.
Political Geography:
United Nations

35. Response

Author:
Proma Sen
Publication Date:
02-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
On a preliminary reading of “International Criminal Justice: Growing Pains or Incurable Contradictions,” by Professor James von Geldern, one understands that the debate about enforcement arises from the assumption of a pre-existing set of human rights concerns in the world today. Beyond the continuing debate surrounding the universal applicability versus the cultural relativism of these rights, the very existence of human rights in today's globalizing context leads to the question of how these rights can be protected and who is responsible for their enforcement? To date, the largest internationally accepted organization with the combined political power of multiple nations is the United Nations and its various sub-organizations. The highest global power seemingly permitted to pass cross-national judgments today is the International Criminal Court (ICC), formed by the Rome Statute, which was drafted in 1998. Yet the ICC has not convicted enough aggressors to truly be deemed a successful mechanism for justice.
Topic:
Human Rights
Political Geography:
United Nations

36. Foreword

Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
The Macalester International Roundtable, an intellectual festival convened each October, is an occasion for serious conversations across the College on topics of transnational significance. The practice is to commission a set of essays—a keynote address, followed by two additional major essays delivered by seasoned scholars—which become the center of dialogue and discussions. Each of the two essays receives a public response from a Macalester senior and a member of the faculty. The purposes of the Roundtable are to cogitate together upon crucial but difficult global questions and to cultivate further the equipoise that minds of the Macalester academic community have long been expected to hold between local anxieties and transnational pressures.

37. Supporting America's Children and Adolescents

Author:
Jacquelynne S. Eccles
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Contemporary vulnerabilities that beset human beings around the world come in a variety of guises and affect diverse populations differently. Perhaps no category of people is as easily exposed as children to such injuries as the interconnected factors of poverty, disease, lack of education, physical violence, and family breakdown. To be sure, there is marked and continuous progress on a number of fronts, particularly in the reduction of mortality among the young. Yet many children and adolescents still suffer from a variety of risks to their well-being. Although not confronted with as many or as severe risks as children in the developing world, many children and adolescents in the United States are at high risk—higher than the risks faced by their counterparts in many other Western industrialized countries. Despite the fact that the United States ranks first in Gross Domestic Product, it is last among the industrial North in relative child poverty, adolescent birth rates, and securing children against gun violence. Furthermore, the United States has relatively high rates of low birth weight and infant mortality statistics as well as other indicators of poor health, such as obesity, asthma, and lack of physical fitness. For example, our country ranks 43rd among developed countries in infant mortality. Each of these risks is most pronounced among families living in poverty, many of whom are also members of racial and ethnic minority populations.
Topic:
Health
Political Geography:
United States

38. Protecting Children in Armed Conflicts as a New Imperative of International Peace and Security

Author:
Tonderai W. Chikuhwa
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
One may say that there is no clearer mirror on the soul of who we are than the reflection of how we treat our children. The horrors that are being visited on children in more than thirty conflicts around the world today are a shadow over our collective conscience. The most conservative estimates suggest that in the past decade more than two million children have been killed in armed conflict. Three times that number have been seriously injured or permanently disabled. Millions of others have been forced to witness and even partake in terrible acts of violence. Hundreds of thousands of children continue to be exploited as child soldiers, and tens of thousands of girls are being subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence. Abductions of children are a more common and widespread enterprise than ever before. And, since 2003, over fourteen million children have been forcibly displaced within and outside their home countries, and between 8,000 and 10,000 children are killed or maimed every year as a result of landmines.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and India

39. Response

Author:
Leigh Bercaw
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Last semester I walked to school through one of the toughest neighborhoods in the capital city of Madagascar. Every morning my friends and I passed the same gang of sleeping street-children—honestly the best word for it is puppy pile. They were a shivering, shifting heap of children, and they broke my heart. On the way home from school, they were awake and I was afraid of them. If I walked alone, they would surround me and steal everything in my pockets. They eventually pulled one of my friends to the ground and took her backpack. As a student of anthropology trained to approach multifaceted issues by looking first through the lens of the particular, these kids, for me, embody the complexity of the lives of children living in difficult situations. They inspire our compassion and move us through their vulnerability. Yet, they simultaneously remind us that they are agents in their own right.
Political Geography:
Tamil Nadu

40. Response

Author:
Jean-Pierre Karegeye
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
The movie Slumdog Millionaire (2008), adapted from Vikas Swarup's 2005 novel Q A, tells the story of Jamal Malik, a vulnerable orphan and street boy exposed to the misery of the world: extreme poverty, disease, lack of education, violence, murder, prostitution in Cherry Street, police brutality, and other misfortunes. Very painful images, but not without promise and determination, show Jamal at five years old, covered in excrement, succeed in reaching the Indian movie star, Amitabah, and receive an autograph. When Jamal starts playing and winning “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” Sergeant Srinivas and other policemen torture Jamal because they cannot understand how this vulnerable lost child is winning the game. Their conclusion: he must be cheating. The film places us into the dialectic of vulnerability and promise. What we can take from it is that the well-being of a child is not a private affair. It is linked to the order of the economic and the political, with these two words understood in their etymological sense. The fact of being on orphan evokes the oikos and miserable life in the streets, as well as the cops' response referring to the order of the polis. Jamal Malik's exceptional achievement raises the question of how is this possible? What is the correct answer among the four choices in the film: he cheated, he's lucky, he's a genius, it is destiny? There is a risk of celebrating the idea of heroism in Jamal Malik's character and forgetting the call to protect vulnerable children. Any promise is inscribed in a societal project that creates conditions of possibility for the protection and success of children. Tonderai Chikuhwa, senior advisor at the United Nations, discusses the Roundtable theme of “Children of the World: The Dialectic of Promise and Vulnerability” by focusing on particular situations of children involved in armed conflict and he evokes concrete actions/operations by the United Nations to protect such “child soldiers.” The well-being of children has been defined as a “categorical imperative” for the realization of planetary peace and security, which therefore calls for actions from the United Nations Security Council.
Topic:
Economics and Political Economy
Political Geography:
United Nations