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Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives examines the relationship between legal pluralities and the prospects for greater gender justice in developing countries. Rather than asking whether legal pluralities are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women, the starting point of this volume is that legal pluralities are a social fact. Adopting a more anthropological approach to the issues of gender justice and women’s rights, it analyzes how gendered rights claims are made and responded to within a range of different cultural, social, economic and political contexts. By examining the different ways in which legal norms, instruments and discourses are being used to challenge or reinforce gendered forms of exclusion, contributing authors generate new knowledge about the dynamics at play between the contemporary contexts of legal pluralities and the struggles for gender justice. Any consideration of this relationship must, it is concluded, be located within a broader, historically informed analysis of regimes of governance.
This book analyses the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in various international, regional and national contexts.
The Nordic states were among the first in the world to enact general gender equality and anti-discrimination laws with low threshold enforcement mechanisms. Today, the Nordic countries top the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index –but they have still not succeeded in closing the gender gap. This book draws a diverse and complex picture of the long, uneven, and unfinished process towards substantive equality in four Nordic countries: Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland. It presents the Nordic gender equality model’s systematic use of three measures: overarching gender policies, legislation that has an explicit or implicit impact on gender relations, and gender equality and anti-disc...
This book engages with contemporary African human rights struggles including land, property, gender equality and legal identity. Through ethnographic field studies it situates claims-making by groups and individuals that have been subject to injustices and abuses, often due to different forms of displacement, in specific geographical, historical and political contexts. Exploring local communities’ complexities and divided interests it addresses the ambiguities and tensions surrounding the processes whereby human rights have been incorporated into legislation, social and economic programs, legal advocacy, land reform, and humanitarian assistance. It shows how existing relations of inequality, domination and control are affected by the opportunities offered by emerging law and governance structures as a plurality of non-state actors enter what previously was considered the sole regulatory domain of the nation state.
Are women's fragile land rights in Africa being eroded in a period of privatisation and land reforms sponsored by the World Bank? Changing global employment and trade patters and the HIV/AIDS epidemic has affected women in particular. A complexity is that women's and men's interests within households are both joint and separate, yet many land reform programmes are based on the notion of a unitary household in which resources benefit the whole family. Today new land market opportunities also tend to put women at a disadvantage, just as they were under colonialism. Women's secondary rights to land are being extinguished. The detailed, local level research in this volume not only challenges the status quo, but demonstrates that another world is possible and documents the many ways women in Eastern Africa are finding to ensure their rights to land.
This volume contains revised versions of a select number of research papers presented at a conference in Oslo, Norway, entitled “The New International Law”. The conference was subtitled “Polycentric Decision-making Structures and Fragmented Spheres of Law: What Implications for the New Generation of International Legal Discourse?” This subtitle signals the most important elements of the conference’s main purpose which was to be a project in line with certain strands of contemporary scholarship on international law; scholarship that bases itself on certain assumptions regarding what are important and changing preconditions for the field of international law research. Such assumption...
Drawing on scholars and practitioners from law and philosophy, this book offers new insights on Security as a term of art subject to normative evolution and gaps. Review of the role of international organisations, the changing face of armed conflict, human rights and democratic guarantees as measures of security, and the challenge of climate change provides rich topics for consideration.
This study examines and compares the important work on global human rights advocacy done by religious NGOs and by secular NGOs. By studying the similarities in how such organizations understand their work, we can better consider not only how religious and secular NGOs might complement each other but also how they might collaborate and cooperate in the advancement of human rights. However, little research has attempted to compare these types of NGOs and their approaches. NGOs and Human Rights explores this comparison and identifies the key areas of overlap and divergence. In so doing, it lays the groundwork for better understanding how to capitalize on the strengths of religious groups, espec...
In the last century, the treatment of victims of involuntary sterilisation and castration in Nordic countries has varied drastically from state-to-state, across time and victim groups. Considering why this is the case, Daniela Alaattinoğlu investigates how laws and practices of involuntary, surgical sterilisation and castration have been established, abolished and remedied in three Nordic states: Sweden, Norway and Finland. Employing a vast range of primary and secondary sources, Alaattinoğlu traces the national and international developments of the last 100 years. Developing the concept of grievance formation, the book explores why some states have claimed public responsibility while others have not, and why some victim groups have mobilised while others have remained silent. Through this pioneering analysis, Alaattinoğlu illuminates issues of human and constitutional rights, the evolution of the welfare state and state responsibility in both a national and global context.
This book explores the customary, social, economic political and rights issues surrounding access, ownership and control over land from a gender perspective. It combines theory and practice from researchers, lawyers and judges, each with track records of working on women and rights concerns. The nexus between the reluctance to recognize and materialize women's right to land, and the increasing feminization of poverty is undeniable. The problem assumes special acuity in an essentially agrarian context like Cameroon, where the problem is not so much the law as its manner of application. That this book delves into investigating the principal sources and reasons for this prevalent injustice is p...