{"title":"Forging Modern States with Imperfect Tools: United Nations Technical Assistance for Public Administration in Decolonized States","authors":"G. Sinclair","doi":"10.1353/HUM.2020.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HUM.2020.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the UN's programs of technical assistance for public administration as a \"technology of stateness\" during the postwar period of decolonization. Drawing on original research in the UN Archives, the article shows how these programs connected with a larger network of actors interested in promoting public administration reforms in decolonized states. Additionally, the article analyzes the assemblage of governmental rationalities and technologies advanced by UN technical assistance, finding both a tendency towards the centralization of state power and an effort to decentralize and disarm state bureaucracies. In doing so, the article suggests new lines of research connecting the colonial concept of \"good government\" to the more recent discourse of \"good governance.\"","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HUM.2020.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43338182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Development Projections: The World Bank in Calcutta in the 1970s","authors":"Corinna R. Unger","doi":"10.1353/hum.2020.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2020.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article studies the World Bank's Calcutta Urban Development Project (CUDP) in the 1970s through the lens of institutional projection. Specifically, it focuses on the World Bank's effort to strengthen the administrative capacity of the state of West Bengal as part of and as a condition for the success of urban development. The article critically engages with the characterization of the World Bank as an 'anti-politics machine' and argues that case of the CUDP shows that the organization, rather than trying to depoliticize India's development problems, acknowledged the distinctly political nature of these problems and tried to solve them with managerial means.","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/hum.2020.0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47432763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Technologies of Stateness","authors":"Nehal Bhuta, G. Sinclair","doi":"10.1353/hum.2020.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2020.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Introduction provides an overview of the dossier and its main themes. It situates the contribution in a wider literature and points towards new research horizons on the relationship between state-making and international organization.","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/hum.2020.0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48728458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The League of Nations, Ethiopia, and the Making of States","authors":"M. Donaldson","doi":"10.1353/HUM.2020.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HUM.2020.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article uses the case of Ethiopia to illustrate how the League of Nations refracted approaches to statehood. It shows the League 'making' states in multiple ways, formulating new standards for admission, but also changing the context in which such standards could be debated, applied, and contested. The article looks beyond intellectual debates about the nature of the state, into exchanges within foreign ministries and League committees, as well as state-making projects pursued in Addis Ababa. This illuminates the fragility of interwar definitions of the state, and challenges narratives that locate the pathologies of 'peripheral' statehood in the post-1945 era.","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HUM.2020.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46229352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inscribing the State: Constitution Drafting Manuals as Textual Technologies","authors":"S. Kendall","doi":"10.1353/HUM.2020.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HUM.2020.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The rise of expert knowledge in constitutional matters marks a turn toward \"constitutional technicity,\" where constitution drafting is regarded as a domain of technical expertise inhabited by neutral and politically divested actors. This article considers the constitution drafting manual or handbook as a genre in which technical expertise confronts the political. These documents consolidate a view of what constitutes \"best practice\" in the production of contemporary state identity, yet they also act into the field of state-building, naturalizing particular understandings of the state that reflect liberal legalist norms. In this sense the constitution-drafting manual is a consequential legal material that enlists values and actors in the production of contemporary stateness.","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HUM.2020.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47852982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Human Rights and Economic Inequality","authors":"Daniel M. Brinks, J. Dehm, Karen Engle","doi":"10.1353/hum.2019.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2019.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The introduction situates this dossier on “Human Rights and Inequality” within broader scholarly and policy debates about the relationship between human rights and economic inequality, specifically about the extent to which human rights do, can, or should attend to economic inequality. It draws out the key arguments of each of the contributions and puts them in conversation with one another by describing the different strands and traditions of human rights scholarship and practice with which the various authors engage. Along the way, the introduction specifies the various types of economic inequality that have too often been lumped together—inequality within countries, among countries, and among individuals from around the world—and identifies the questions of measurement that must be addressed for a fruitful debate to take place. It concludes by recognizing that, notwithstanding their differences, all the contributions share an outrage at the scandal of inequality in our present and a commitment to imagining paths towards a more egalitarian and just world. The dossier demonstrates the continued need for engaged, ongoing, conversations about the multiple forms of economic inequality and the potential roles of human rights in addressing them.","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/hum.2019.0019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47944433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Global Inequality and Human Rights: An Odd Couple","authors":"R. Falk","doi":"10.1353/hum.2019.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2019.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the current phase of global and national economic development, income inequality has become a widespread concern. This article focuses on what it calls “toxic inequality” in the United States that is attributed to several elements including the underlying individualism associated with capitalism and the tendency of neoliberal globalization to exert pressures that minimize social protection of vulnerable parts of the population. International law has not been effective in protecting societies against the disruptive effects of inequality, including its de-democratizing effects brought about by the reaction of the state to social rage directed at the established order. The article argues for a revised human rights approach to overcome toxic inequality, including the conditions that bring it about. One aspect of such an approach would be more energetic efforts to implement the norms of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, taking political steps to persuade the Unitec States to become a party to the treaty regime.","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/hum.2019.0023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45464962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“I Don’t Want to Live in a World Where People Die Every Day Simply Because They Are Poor”: From the Treatment Action Campaign to Equal Education, from Stories of Human Rights to the Poetics of Inequality","authors":"N. Hoad","doi":"10.1353/hum.2019.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2019.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores the rhetorical and genre differences between human rights arguments and inequality arguments, speculating that the former privileges narrative as a dominant mode of representation and that the latter frequently require a poetics—paradoxically the poetics of numbers. Two South African NGOs—the Treatment Action Campaign, whose rationale deployed a health and human rights framework, and Equal Education, an organization deeply invested in arguments about inequalities in education and opportunity—are presented as examples of the defining contrast between the ways that human rights and inequality arguments broach the question of justice.","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/hum.2019.0026","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44218549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inequality, Human Rights, and the New International Economic Order","authors":"Antony T. Anghie","doi":"10.1353/hum.2019.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2019.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Redressing global inequality was one of the key concerns of the Third World campaign to create a New International Economic Order (NIEO). However, human rights played no role in the NIEO which focused instead on transforming the international investment and trade regimes. This essay argues that the Third World countries were largely correct in their analysis of the limits of human rights. It draws upon insights of the NIEO experience to suggest why, in more recent times, human rights have largely failed to address the problem of global inequality in the face of neo-liberal globalization.","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/hum.2019.0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47346736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Human Rights in an Unequal World: Structural Inequalities and the Imperative for Global Cooperation","authors":"R. Balakrishnan, J. Heintz","doi":"10.1353/hum.2019.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2019.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Efforts to realize social and economic rights are currently being exercised in a context of extreme inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth. This question of the impact of global inequalities on the realization of rights and development objectives extends to inequalities in power dynamics and policy space. The economic interdependencies that structure the global economy mean that the actions of governments in influential economies frequently constrain the ability of other countries to fully support the enjoyment of rights. This essay explores the relationship between global economic inequality and human rights. It demonstrates how inequality affects the enjoyment of rights worldwide, and how the human rights framework has implications for how we think about global inequalities.","PeriodicalId":44775,"journal":{"name":"Humanity-An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/hum.2019.0017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44584257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}