Poland's Solidarity Movement and the Global Politics of Human Rights

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Brier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Solidarity Movement

Introduction

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Aiden Warren ◽  
Damian Grenfell
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
State Security ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
External Powers ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Dominate Discourse

The need to fundamentally rethink interventions is before us. Driven by a combination of pressing humanitarian need as well as conceptual and theoretical dilemmas that limit the value of analysis, it is evident we are seemingly at the crossroads. The crises in Syria and Iraq – the human rights abuses, the destruction of cities and the attenuating flows of refugees into Europe – have only been enough to garner specific military action from external powers in ways closely aligned to national interests. There is the sense that despite being decades on from the end of the Cold War and notwithstanding the varying kinds of interventions in the name of humanitarian ends that have taken place, we have come full circle. For all their challenges and faults, at the end of the twentieth century Kosovo and Timor-Leste suggested that there was enough benefit gained by interventions that they had a future in global politics. The post-9/11 military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have, however, come to dominate discourse as wars fought overwhelmingly for state security rather than humanitarian ends (even though the latter are used instrumentally as a justification at times). Moreover, as events in Syria have unfolded, it has become even harder to discern who would be assisted, and to what end, by a large-scale intervention like those that occurred across the 1990s. The widening of Syria’s civil war into a regional one, and the toll on civilians (approximately 260,000 at time of publication), reflects elements that are described in ‘new wars’ analysis, and yet are overlain with shifting forms of globalised warfare, intersections with terrorism, while reaffirming what appears to be more classical superpower rivalries (though now it is between different versions of empire and capitalism). It is such a riven mess that it is quite possible that the only ‘end game’ will come in the form of general annihilation....

Terrorist in Search of Humanity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faisal Devji
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Sleeping Beauty ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Al Qaeda ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Contemporary Politics

A global society has come into being, but possesses as yet no political institutions of its own. In his book, Faisal Devji argues that new forms of militancy, like that of Al Qaeda, achieve meaning in this institutional vacuum, while representing in their various ways the search for a global politics. From environmentalism to pacifism and beyond, such a politics can only be one that takes humanity itself as its object, hence militant practices are informed by the same search that animates humanitarianism, which from human rights to humanitarian intervention has become the global aim and signature of all contemporary politics. This is the search for humanity as an agent and not simply the victim of history. To the militant, victimized Muslims represent not their religion so much as humanity itself, and terrorism the effort to turn this humanity into an historical actor – since it is after all the globe’s only possible actor. For environmentalists and pacifists as much as for our holy warriors, a global humanity has in this way replaced the international proletariat as the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ of history.

Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 795-797
Author(s):  
Lloyd Steffen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Politics

Studying Human Rights in the Middle East: Lingua Franca of Global Politics or Forked Tongue of Donors?

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Allen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Women’S Human Rights ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
Women's Human Rights ◽  
Role Of Religion

The study of human rights has gone through many phases, and the boom in the scholarly industry of human rights studies has yielded many subspecialties, including human rights in particular regions and the intersections of human rights with different religious traditions. One principal area of discussion likely to be of interest to readers of this journal has been the question of Muslim women's human rights and the role of religion in this respect. The problem was often presented as primarily an ideological one, a conflict between a local tradition, Islam, and the global demands for human rights.

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