Books in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Morsink asserts that all people have human rights simply by virtue of being born into the human family and that we can know these rights without the aid of experts. He shows how the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights grew out of Enlightenment principles honed by a shared revulsion at the horrors of the Holocaust.

This volume makes a significant contribution to the debate about the connections between the protection of human rights and the pursuit of economic development in Africa.

"A significant contribution to current legal, political, and economic discourse on workers in the global economy."-International and Comparative Law Quarterly

International Human Rights Law is a comprehensive introductory treatise, intended for all concerned about this critical area of international law, including students, lawyers, other advocates, teachers, and academics.

Reza Afshari reveals Iran's attempt to hide human rights abuses by labeling oppression as an authentic cultural practice.

How do nongovernmental organizations affect the world of human rights?

The first in-depth study of a novel women's refugee movement and its challenge, as an international trigger case, to traditional conceptions of human rights. It illuminates keys to the movement's success, including, paradoxically, noncitizen politics, and uncovers critical implications for theories of human rights change.

Selected by Choice magazine as a Outstanding Academic Book for 2000Nelson Mandela once said, "Human rights have become the focal point of international relations." This has certainly become true in American relations with the People''s Republic of China. Ann Kent''s book documents China''s compliance with the norms and rules of international treaties, and serves as a case study of the effectiveness of the international human rights regime, that network of international consensual agreements concerning acceptable treatment of individuals at the hands of nation-states.Since the early 1980s, and particularly since 1989, by means of vigorous monitoring and the strict maintenance of standards, United Nations human rights organizations have encouraged China to move away from its insistence on the principle of noninterference, to take part in resolutions critical of human rights conditions in other nations, and to accept the applicability to itself of human rights norms and UN procedures. Even though China has continued to suppress political dissidents at home, and appears at times resolutely defiant of outside pressure to reform, Ann Kent argues that it has gradually begun to implement some international human rights standards.

Documents a seven-year diplomatic war by Argentina's brutal regime. This book relates how, starting in 1976, Argentina's military government tried to cripple the UN's human rights machinery in an effort to prevent international condemnation of its policy of disappearances.

Everyday Occupations engages visual culture and the ethnography of space, satire and parody, poetry and political critique to examine militarization as it is wielded as a cultural and political tool, and as it is experienced as a material form of violence and symbolic domination.

Human Rights and Disability Advocacy brings together perspectives from civil society representatives who played key roles in the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, shedding light on the emergent practices of a "new diplomacy" and the larger enterprise of human rights advocacy at the international level.

Combining theoretical rigor with solid empirical research, Human Rights Under African Constitutions makes an important contribution for scholars and students of political science, African studies, and postcolonial history, as well as providing a vital resource for NGOs and policymakers.

Roman David analyzes major institutional innovations devised in Central Europe to deal with officials tainted by their complicity with prior regimes. He examines the historical origins, social meanings, and political effects of personnel systems based on dismissal, exposure, and confession in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland.

Disability, Human Rights, and Information Technology addresses the global issue of equal access to information and communications technology for persons with disabilities.

In Human Rights in Turkey, twenty-one Turkish and international scholars from a number of different disciplines examine a wide range of human rights issues and government polices since the 1920s at the intersection of domestic and international politics.

"A splendid volume . . . fused with political and philosophical insight into the fundamental concepts underlying the Declaration."-American Journal of International Law

In Muslims in Global Politics, Mahmood Monshipouri examines the role identity plays in the political dynamics of six different Muslim nations-Egypt, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Iran, and Indonesia-as well as in Muslim diaspora communities in Europe and North America.

Rainforest Warriors is a historical, ethnographic, and documentary account of a people, their threatened rainforest, and their successful attempt to harness international human rights law in their fight to protect their way of life-part of a larger story of tribal and indigenous peoples that is unfolding all over the globe.

Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence explores the relationship between the human rights movement emerging after 1945 and the increasing violence of decolonization. Based on material previously inaccessible in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, this comparative study uses the Mau Mau War (1952-1956) and the Algerian War (1954-1962) to examine the policies of two major imperial powers, Britain and France. Historian Fabian Klose considers the significance of declared states of emergency, counterinsurgency strategy, and the significance of humanitarian international law in both conflicts.Klose''s findings from these previously confidential archives reveal the escalating violence and oppressive tactics used by the British and French military during these anticolonial conflicts in North and East Africa, where Western powers that promoted human rights in other areas of the world were opposed to the growing global acceptance of freedom, equality, self-determination, and other postwar ideals. Practices such as collective punishment, torture, and extrajudicial killings did lasting damage to international human rights efforts until the end of decolonization.Clearly argued and meticulously researched, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence demonstrates the mutually impacting histories of international human rights and decolonization, expanding our understanding of political violence in human rights discourse.

Through careful archival research, Glenn Mitoma reveals how the U.S. government, key civil society groups, Cold War politics, and specific individuals led to America's emergence in the twentieth century as an ambivalent yet central player in establishing an international rights ethic.

In The Age of Apology twenty-two law, politics, and human rights scholars explore the legal, political, social, historical, moral, religious, and anthropological aspects of Western apologies.

Torture is the most widespread human rights crime in the modern world. How could something so brutal, almost unthinkable, be so prevalent? This work is designed to answer that question. It also examines questions such as: Can anyone be turned into a torturer? What exactly is the psychological relationship between a torturer and his victim?

Critically explores the anatomy of the human rights movement in East Africa, examining its origins, challenges, and emergent themes in the context of political transitions in the region. In particular, the book seeks to understand the political and normative challenges that face this young but vibrant civil society in the vortex of globalization.

As nations struggling to heal wounds of civil war and atrocity turn toward the model of reconciliation, Reconciliation in Divided Societies takes a systematic look at the political dimensions of this international phenomenon.

Theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, Conflict and Compliance paints a new picture of the complex dynamics at work when states face competing pressures to comply with and violate international human rights norms.

Freedom from Poverty examines how today's non-governmental organizations are modifying human rights practices and reshaping the political landscape by taking up the cause of subsistence rights. Rights are being used as legal, moral, and political tools in the struggle to provide food, housing, and healthcare to those in need.

Based on exclusive interviews with the top surviving Khmer Rouge leader, Nuon Chea, this book tells the story of a man who began as an idealistic freedom fighter and wound up involved in one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, Cambodia's Killing Fields.

Daniel Whelan illustrates how the rhetoric of indivisibility has frequently been used to further political ends that have little to do with protecting the rights of the individual. Drawing on scores of original documents, he reveals the conflicts and compromises behind a half century of human rights discourse.