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Feminism And Democracy, Louis Edgar Esparza
Feminism And Democracy, Louis Edgar Esparza
Human Rights & Human Welfare
After work on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks walked onto a bus that was to take her home that night. She ended up on a trip to jail instead, for refusing to give her seat to a white passenger. The event triggered resistance to bus segregation, the founding of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and the election of the then-unknown Dr. Martin Luther King as its leader. The success of the campaign is an integral battle in our historical retellings of the US African American Civil Rights Movement. Fewer recount the sexual harassment against black women by white …
The Irony Of Refuge: Gender-Based Violence Against Female Refugees In Africa, Liz Miller
The Irony Of Refuge: Gender-Based Violence Against Female Refugees In Africa, Liz Miller
Human Rights & Human Welfare
The Sudanese soldiers and the Janjawid invaded her village. When she tried to escape, they gang-raped her. At that time, she was eight months pregnant and described giving birth to a dead baby afterward and being very sick. She could not make it with her group to the border to flee to Chad so she had to walk alone. Once she got to Chad, she was raped by a Chadian soldier outside of the camp and became pregnant. Afterwards, her husband divorced her, and she now lives with the stigma of being a rape victim. She has been expelled from …
Latin America’S Indigenous Women, Courtney Hall
Latin America’S Indigenous Women, Courtney Hall
Human Rights & Human Welfare
Latin America’s indigenous women are as diverse as the land they inhabit. Their uniqueness is shaped by belonging to groups that have their own distinct history, traditions, and identity. Yet despite this diversity, indigenous women confront the same human rights challenges: racial, gender, and socio-economic discrimination. Without ignoring the diversity of indigenous women, a better understanding of their fundamental struggles can be gained by weaving these issues together in a comprehensive narrative.
Bedouin Women In The Naqab, Israel: Ongoing Transformation, Marcy M. Wells
Bedouin Women In The Naqab, Israel: Ongoing Transformation, Marcy M. Wells
Human Rights & Human Welfare
Since its inception in 1948, the state of Israel has based development plans on an agenda of nation-building that has systematically excluded Palestinian Arab citizens such as the indigenous Bedouin. Policies of relocation, resettlement, and restructuring have been imposed on the Bedouin, forcing them from their ancestral lands and lifestyle in the Naqab (or Negev, as it is called in Hebrew) desert of southern Israel. The rapid and involuntary transition from self-sufficient, semi-nomadic, pastoral life to sedentarization and modernization has resulted in dependency on a state that treats the Bedouin as minority outsiders through unjust social, political, and economic structures. …
Political Repression And Islam In Iran, Amy Kirk
Political Repression And Islam In Iran, Amy Kirk
Human Rights & Human Welfare
Signs with the slogan, ‘I am Neda’, flooded the streets of Tehran in the violent aftermath of the 2009 presidential elections and assassination of Neda Agha-Soltan. The internationally publicized video of Neda’s death became an iconic rallying point for the reformist opposition in Iran. Stringent clampdowns since the 1979 revolution have signified a sociopolitical change that has endured for three decades. President Khatami’s reform efforts of the late 1990s were stifled by Ahmadinejad’s election of 2005. Since Ahmadinejad’s appointment there has been little official tolerance for political and fundamental Islamic dissent, leading to serious human rights violations against the reformist …
A Few Drops Of Oil Will Not Be Enough, Stephen James
A Few Drops Of Oil Will Not Be Enough, Stephen James
Human Rights & Human Welfare
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn provide a rich description of the various kinds of violence, deprivation, depredation and exploitation that women experience on a vast scale in the developing world. They write of sex trafficking, acid attacks, “bride burning,” enslavement, spousal beatings, unequal healthcare (something the USA still struggles with), insufficient food, gendered abortions and infant and maternal mortality. They are right to identify the education of women and girls as part of the solution to the widespread “gendercide.” However, their approach focuses too much on the capacity, indeed the virtue or heroism, of individual women. It does not take …
From Outrage To Action, Henry Krisch
From Outrage To Action, Henry Krisch
Human Rights & Human Welfare
Kristof and WuDunn provide a vivid panoramic view of problems faced by women (primarily in the “developing” world), what has been done and what more could be done to help them achieve dignity and autonomy in their lives, and how vindication of their rights could contribute to the broader social development of their societies. In this they provide us with important insights into how human rights might be effectively proclaimed and successfully implemented. In reviewing their considerable contributions, I shall also suggest some limitations on both their analysis and their policy recommendations.
Violence In The House, Katherine Hite
Violence In The House, Katherine Hite
Human Rights & Human Welfare
There was something particularly haunting in reading this Kristof and WuDunn piece during the week’s major US headlines: a girl in California had been imprisoned for eighteen years in the home of a man who kidnapped and raped her, fathered her children, and employed her in his small enterprise—a business card design and printing agency. Business clients interviewed for the story appeared completely taken aback. Clients had always found the now twenty-nine-year-old Jaycee Dugard “professional, polite, and responsive” as well as “creative and talented in her work.” Others expressed similar shock, recounting that Ms. Dugard “was always smiling.” Ms. Dugard’s …
October Roundtable: Introduction
October Roundtable: Introduction
Human Rights & Human Welfare
An annotation of:
The Women's Crusade. By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The New York Review of Books. August 17, 2009.
"The Female Entrepreneur"?, Cath Collins
"The Female Entrepreneur"?, Cath Collins
Human Rights & Human Welfare
I read the “Women’s Crusade” article that forms the centrepiece of this month’s roundtable with initial interest, gradually turning to a vague sense of disquiet spiced with occasional disbelief. After a few more readings, I tried highlighting the passages that bothered me and stringing them together. Countries “riven by fundamentalism”— that’s presumably the Islamic variety, rather than the Christian variant which holds such sway in the US. The suggestion that “everyone from the World Bank to the US [...] Chiefs of Staff to [...] CARE” now thinks that women are the answer to global extremism hides too many questionable assumptions …
Moving Beyond Divisive Discourse: Latin American Women In Politics, Ursula Miniszewski
Moving Beyond Divisive Discourse: Latin American Women In Politics, Ursula Miniszewski
Human Rights & Human Welfare
On June 25, 1993 the United Nations General Assembly held the World Conference on Human Rights, which adopted the Declaration and Programme of Action that states, “The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community.” On September 18, 2008 The New York Times quoted Senator Cecilia López Montaño …
Violated: Women’S Human Rights In Sub-Saharan Africa, Kathryn Birdwell Wester
Violated: Women’S Human Rights In Sub-Saharan Africa, Kathryn Birdwell Wester
Human Rights & Human Welfare
In contemporary sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), women are facing human rights abuses unparalleled elsewhere in the world. Despite the region’s diversity, its female inhabitants largely share experiences of sexual discrimination and abuse, intimate violence, political marginalization, and economic deprivation.
Rights And The Hijâb: Rationality And Discourse In The Public Sphere, Howard Adelman
Rights And The Hijâb: Rationality And Discourse In The Public Sphere, Howard Adelman
Human Rights & Human Welfare
The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens by Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 251 pp.
and
Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space by John R. Bowen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 290 pp.
and
Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics & Social Exclusion by Trica Danielle Keaton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 223 pp.
and
Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe by Dominic McGoldrick. Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2006. 320 pp.
April Roundtable: Introduction
April Roundtable: Introduction
Human Rights & Human Welfare
An annotation of:
“Women Come Last in Afghanistan ” by Ann Jones. Salon.com. February 6, 2007.
The Trouble With Rights, David L. G. Rice
The Trouble With Rights, David L. G. Rice
Human Rights & Human Welfare
Do human rights imply enforcement powers? Do they require police or armies? How many soldiers would it take to secure universal human rights? What sort of weaponry would suffice?
The Limits Of “No-Limit”, J. Peter Pham
The Limits Of “No-Limit”, J. Peter Pham
Human Rights & Human Welfare
One must acknowledge and even admire the passion that writer and photographer Ann Jones brings to the different causes she embraces as she meanders along the paths of her rather eclectic career, now spanning over three decades. Her first book, Uncle Tom’s Campus (1973), examines how her students, in a predominantly African-American college, were being shortchanged by the system. In the late 1990s, she took off across Africa in search of a legendary tribe ruled by women and supposedly noted for its embrace of “feminine” principles of tolerance, diplomacy, and compromise, and returned to publish a travelogue-cum-utopian Weltanschauung set in …
Oppressing Women: Who Benefits And How?, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
Oppressing Women: Who Benefits And How?, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
Human Rights & Human Welfare
Women are the world’s oldest marketable commodity. “Good” women are marketed by their fathers, or brothers, to other men as wives. “Bad” women are incarcerated, raped, killed, or prostituted. Methods of marketing women range widely in kind: from simple one-on-one bargains, where two men exchange daughters or sisters; to exchange of women for material goods; to use of women to pay debts; to renting out women by the hour or minute to other men for sex.
Global Health And Global Hegemony, Randall Kuhn
Global Health And Global Hegemony, Randall Kuhn
Human Rights & Human Welfare
As the new director of a unique graduate program in Global Health Affairs, coming from the world of basic research, I have been faced with the need to reconcile a central paradox of American power and hegemony: I conduct my work as an American citizen and often with U.S. government funding in the hope that it will make a positive or at least neutral impact on my world. Yet my government (not only under the present administration) initiates imperial adventures that cause untold damage to the health, welfare, and survival of individuals throughout the world.