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This book collects and analyzes a repertoire of responses by human rights organizations to the crackdown against civil society in the populist context. Written by scholars and advocates in challenging political settings from around the world, this book offers ideas and inspiration to their peers in the human rights community who are grappling with and resisting the erosion of democracy and rights. This collection takes two steps towards clearing the path for this civil society transformation. First, it clarifies the specific challenges to human rights raised by contemporary populist regimes and movements. What is the populist playbook against human rights? Second, it contributes to documenti...
Human rights — and the international institutions that strive to protect them — are under increasing attack from powerful actors on the global stage, from recent political trends even within established democracies and from new technologies. Together, these threats have undermined what had been a fragile international consensus as recently as two decades ago about the importance of concerted international action to protect human rights and punish those who abuse them. China, Russia, and other nondemocratic regimes have become increasingly bold in acting as if agreed-upon international human rights standards no longer exist, or at least do not apply to them. More broadly, domestic politic...
For decades, framing an issue as a ‘human rights’ issue carried certain power and effect in politics and international relations, one that has been challenged by the recent rise of populist political forces. Ford explores the recent impact of populist politics on the universalist human rights project, in particular, how scholars have framed and responded to this challenge. Ford offers a provocation to the human rights movement. Rather than ‘what have populists done to human rights?’, it asks ‘how did we, the human rights movement, do this to ourselves?’ How did fundamental protections for all become so easily scapegoated as ‘us and them,’ as claims of small, often foreign, mi...
Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy provides a comprehensive historical overview and analysis of the complex and often vexing problem of understanding the formation of U.S. human rights policy. The proper place of human rights and fundamental freedoms in U.S. foreign policy has long been debated among scholars, politicians, and the American public. Clair Apodaca argues that the history of U.S.human rights policy unfolds as a series of prevarications that are the result of presidential preferences, along with the conflict and cooperation among bureaucratic actors. Through a series of chapters devoted to U.S. presidential administrations from Richard Nixon to the present, she delivers a compr...
Leading experts examine the threats posed by populism to human rights and the international systems and explore how to confront them.
Populist authoritarian governments have jeopardized the human rights accomplishments of the 20th century. Ensuring their fulfillment has become a challenge for these governments and an issue for human rights defenders seeking to find ways to resist anti-democratic actions. This book seeks to expose the crisis of human rights at the hands of people who, despite rising to power through democratic means, now see democracy as a limiting institution that must be dismantled urgently. Restrictions on civil society and arbitrary detentions are some of the reasons why this populist and authoritarian vision is incompatible with human rights, which are guaranteed to some and denied to others. Through various narratives, the authors seek to recognize new spaces for struggle—such as political activism—to develop action-research tools in a context of crisis.
This Research Handbook examines the complex relationship between international law and domestic legal systems. An interdisciplinary range of experts analyse the topic from historical, conceptual, critical and doctrinal perspectives, setting the tone for future reflections on the development of the international legal order.
Analysing international law through the prism of “cynicism” makes it possible to look beyond overt disregard for international law, currently discussed in terms of a backlash or crisis. The concept allows to analyse and criticise structural features and specific uses of international law that seem detrimental to international law in a more subtle way. Unlike its ancient predecessor, cynicism nowadays refers not to a bold critique of power but to uses and abuses of international law that pursue one-sided interests tacitly disregarding the legal structure applied. From this point of view, the contributions critically reflect on the theoretical foundations of international law, in particular its relationship to power, actors such as the International Law Commission and international judges, and specific fields, including international human rights, humanitarian, criminal, tax and investment law.
How and why NGOs are increasingly taking independent and direct action in global law enforcement, from human rights to the environment Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have generally served as advocates and service providers, leaving enforcement to states. Now, NGOs are increasingly acting as private police, prosecutors, and intelligence agencies in enforcing international law. NGOs today can be found investigating and gathering evidence; suing and prosecuting governments, companies, and individuals; and even catching lawbreakers red-handed. Examining this trend, Vigilantes beyond Borders considers why some transnational groups have opted to become enforcers of international law regardin...
From the former New York Times Asia correspondent and author of China's Second Continent, an incisive investigation of China's ideological development as it becomes an ever more aggressive player in regional and global diplomacy. For many years after its reform and opening in 1978, China maintained an attitude of false modesty about its ambitions. That role, reports Howard French, has been set aside. China has asserted its place among the global heavyweights, revealing its plans for pan-Asian dominance by building its navy, increasing territorial claims to areas like the South China Sea, and diplomatically bullying smaller players. Underlying this attitude is a strain of thinking that casts China's present-day actions in decidedly historical terms, as the path to restoring the dynastic glory of the past. If we understand how that historical identity relates to current actions, in ways ideological, philosophical, and even legal, we can learn to forecast just what kind of global power China stands to become--and to interact wisely with a future peer. Steeped in deeply researched history as well as on-the-ground reporting, this is French at his revelatory best.