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12. Of Witches and Robots: The Diverse Challenges of Responding to Unlawful Killings in the Twenty-First Century
- Author:
- Philip Alston
- Publication Date:
- 02-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Macalester International
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- From its relatively modest beginnings in 1945, the universal human rights regime has come a very long way. Few if any of those who drafted the apparently unthreatening, but nonetheless foundational, provisions of the United Nations Charter dealing with human rights would have imagined that less than seventy years later the Security Council would have taken action in relation to serious human rights violations in a significant range of countries, that governments would have established an International Criminal Court, or that there would be a wide range of mechanisms that regularly and routinely hold states to account for their human rights performance across a very wide range of issues. This is not, however, to suggest that many of the most egregious human rights problems have been radically ameliorated. They clearly have not. The subjugation of women is a continuing phenomenon in a great many societies, and gender equality remains an unachieved goal even in the most developed economies. Racial discrimination is a constant and forms of ethnic and religious discrimination continue to be both inventive and invidious. Hunger, the denial of basic health care, and access to decent housing are problems that persist on a vast scale around the world. In addition, torture, disappearances, and unlawful killings continue to take place in the majority of states.
- Topic:
- Human Rights
- Political Geography:
- United Nations
13. Response
- Author:
- Ron Barrett
- Publication Date:
- 02-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Macalester International
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- Professor Rebecca Cook addresses a wide range of issues pertaining to gender discrimination and stereotyping that are good launching points for thinking about human rights in the context of global citizenship. Rather than address all these points, I will provide an anthropologist's perspective on three dimensions of gender discrimination that arose in her essay and presentation. The first is a perceptual dimension in which socially constructed stereotypes become so deeply embedded that they appear to be a natural part of the world. The second is an unwritten dimension in which glass ceilings are built over women's careers with rules of success that are based on a long history of male-dominated work environments. Finally, I will address a systemic dimension in which gender discrimination is connected to other axes of inequality that can affect the very survival of women in developing countries around the world.
14. 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
15. 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.
16. 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
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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.
20. 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