{"title":"The Syrian Conflict as a Test Case for the Limits of the International Community and International Law: Global Politics and State Sovereignty Versus Human Rights Protection.","authors":"J. Sarkin, Ross Callum Capazorio","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The Syrian civil war began in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring movement. It soon became internationalized, attracting the spill-in of external actors into the region and birthing the destructive Syrian conflict that continues ten years later. The Syrian conflict has given rise to the worst refugee and humanitarian crisis of the twenty-first century. The intractability of the conflict is attributed to a deadlocked United Nations Security Council, which remains undecided on the issue of humanitarian intervention as a breach of Syria's state sovereignty. This article seeks to answer the question of whether the concept of state sovereignty has taken precedence over a concern for human rights in Syria. This article delves into the conflict and examines the role of international law. It also examines the extensive use of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions and the use of chemical weapons in Syria as weapons of war. It then uses that context to examine the contemporary legal debate over the use of humanitarian intervention in Syria. The article concludes that although state sovereignty has functioned as a legal and normative barrier to the resolution of the conflict and that international law limits what can be done to halt the conflict and the abuses, the underlying issue to blame for not providing protection to the people of Syria is a lack of political will. The article notes that the failure to act on Syria, in terms of the Responsibility to Protect, which has spawned further violence and instability in the region, may have dire consequences in the future. The conflict may also lead to further conflict and human rights violations around the world. It is argued that international law and the UN need to be reformed to be able to deal with such issues more effectively and more often.","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"476 - 513"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43740585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession by Sandra Ristovska (review)","authors":"Isabella Waltz","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0033","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"650 - 653"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44387636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
C. Mollica, S. Davies, J. True, S. Eddyono, Bhavani Fonseka, M. Johnston
{"title":"Women and the Justice Divide in Asia Pacific: How can Informal and Formal Institutions Bridge the Gap?","authors":"C. Mollica, S. Davies, J. True, S. Eddyono, Bhavani Fonseka, M. Johnston","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Across Asia and the Pacific, legal pluralist systems meet both cultural norms and address injustices at the local level. What is the capacity of these pluralist systems to provide justice and mitigate discrimination against women? This article examines women's experiences across five countries to identify the factors that enable and constrain women's engagement with legal pluralist justice systems in the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing on examples of women's individual and collective attempts to access justice specifically concerning custody, land, and violence, this article identifies three persistent conditions that perpetuate women's inability to access justice: the absence of gender mainstreaming resources in pluralist legal systems, most notably in rural, remote, and impoverished communities; cultural and religious preference for women's underrepresentation in decision-making; and women's low representation in justice-related civil service positions.","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"612 - 639"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46614498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Craggs, Tiffany Deguzman, Ivey Dyson, Helena von Nagy, Bryce Rosenbower, E. Stover
{"title":"Finding a Middle Ground? International Humanitarian Aid Organizations, Information Sharing, and the Pursuit of International Justice","authors":"S. Craggs, Tiffany Deguzman, Ivey Dyson, Helena von Nagy, Bryce Rosenbower, E. Stover","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:International humanitarian aid organizations have a duty to provide protection and assistance to displaced persons and other vulnerable groups worldwide. In doing so, they collect personal and often highly sensitive information that may be of interest to international justice institutions investigating violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. The question arises whether humanitarian organizations can—or should—share information with these institutions? Is it possible to find a middle ground that balances the rights, duties, and priorities of those involved? This article examines four issues that affect information sharing between humanitarian organizations and international justice institutions: (1) the right to privacy and justice; (2) mandate requirements; (3) policy requirements; and (4) organizational culture. The article is based on an extensive literature review and interviews with twenty-eight current or former staff members at humanitarian organizations, international tribunals, and United Nations mechanisms and commissions of inquiry.","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"564 - 591"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47644880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics by Wendy S. Hesford (review)","authors":"Alexandra Moore","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0030","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"640 - 644"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48647354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ideacide: How On-Line Petitions and Open Letters Undermine Academic Freedom and Free Expression","authors":"Rhoda E. Howard-hassmann, N. Mclaughlin","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article investigates two recent cases of academic mobbing in the United States. The first concerns Bruce Gilley, whose paper \"The Case for Colonialism,\" published in Third World Quarterly, was heavily criticized by the academic left. The second concerns Rebecca Tuvel, whose article \"In Defense of Transracialism,\" published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, was equally reviled. In both cases, the authors and journal editors endured extreme on-line criticism, including some death threats. The authors analyze this on-line academic bullying through the lens of social psychology. They particularly identify a scissors logic, opening up a major division between the politics of academia and the general public; a new ideology of safetyism; and a new culture of complaint. They argue that these new on-line and sociological phenomena amount to ideacide, or the attempt to extinguish ideas rather than debate them either within the academy or within the public spheres.","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"451 - 475"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45422820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the U.S. by Alexander Laban Hinton (review)","authors":"H. Tolley","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"The attention to misrecognition in chapter three prefigures a more robust discussion of the variations within and limits to theories of recognition within human rights work in chapter four (for this reader, the most compelling chapter in the book). Readers of Hesford’s Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms will be particularly interested in how her use of recognition has shifted from the work of Kelly Oliver on witnessing and recognition founded on mutuality or “response-ability,” which Hesford rightly insists must be grounded in material contexts, to the concept of “diffractive recognition” she develops in Violent Exceptions.15 In chapter four, “Black Childhoods and US Carceral Systems,” she reads the murder of Trayvon Martin through four different theories of recognition in order to demonstrate the ways in which they circumscribe or expand understandings of Martin’s death and his family’s demands for justice. The final chapter examines portrayals of transgender children in select US and African contexts. Employing the material rhetorical approach and drawing on theories of posthumanism and debility, Hesford reads two films, Growing Up Coy and Getting Out in order examine the terms in which the LGBTQI children featured seek, respectively, social acceptance and political asylum. Describing her reading practice, she writes, “To read LGBTQI children’s human rights diffractively is to interrogate the biopolitical extraction of value from the bodies of LGBTQI children: to pull away from heteronormative and neoliberal calibrations of vulnerability, capacity, futurity; and to lean into relational vulnerabilities, capacities, and nonnormative futures.”16 The description captures well the goals of the book as a whole. Violent Exceptions will likely interest scholars from different fields in different ways. Those working within rhetorical studies specifically, and feminist, decolonial, disability, materialist, and posthuman theory more broadly, will find Hesford helpful in thinking through new approaches to understanding dynamic intersections of materiality, history, ideology, and representation. Those focusing specifically on children’s human rights will appreciate her close attention to the political divide between support for the CRC and its optional protocols as well as to the “diffractive” interpretations of her case studies.","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"644 - 648"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48831774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War by Leonard S. Rubenstein (review)","authors":"David P. Forsythe","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"648 - 650"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41836974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Leviathan’s Architect: Urbicide, Urban Renewal, and the Right to the City in Turkish Kurdistan","authors":"Thomas W. Smith","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Urban warfare exacts a grim toll on city life as combatants target civilians and civilian infrastructure, appropriate space, and try to erase culture and memory. Often, however, it is the post-conflict razing and reconstruction that caps this violent re-ordering of urban life. This article explores securitized development of cities in Southeastern Turkey in the wake of recent armed strife between Kurdish fighters and Turkish security forces. Case studies of Sur/Diyarbakır and Nusaybin show an overlord state leveraging post-war blight to remake society from the ground up. Targeting the physical as well as social contours of cities, Ankara has displaced residents, redirected access and flow, and intensified surveillance and control. The upheaval has been disorienting for residents, but in other ways it has sharpened Kurdish identity and agency. Historical preservation and memory projects, cultural commemorations, and new models of post-war urbanism underscore the right to a city that reflects civil society rather than one that tries to reengineer it in the image of the state.","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"387 - 416"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41457578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Human Dignity, the ICRC, and the Swiss Government: The Lessons of History Debated","authors":"D. Forsythe","doi":"10.1353/hrq.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In the past the, ICRC was not careful about establishing full independence from the Swiss government in Bern. This was especially true in the 1930s and 1940s, when ICRC policy closely mirrored Bern’s preferences on key issues arising in relations with Italy and Germany. More recently, the ICRC drew the lesson that it should have had a more independent and dynamic discreet diplomacy, not that it should have necessarily engaged in public denunciations. This historical lesson about independent and dynamic quiet representations concerning specific problems guides ICRC diplomacy today. However, some recent developments raise anew the issue of full independence from Bern.","PeriodicalId":47589,"journal":{"name":"Human Rights Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":"313 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48956107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}