Human Rights Interventions

This book explores and discusses emerging perspectives of Ubuntu from the vantage point of “ordinary” people and connects it to human rights and decolonizing discourses. It engages a decolonizing perspective in writing about Ubuntu as an indigenous concept. The fore grounding argument is that one’s positionality speaks to particular interests that may continue to sustain oppressions instead of confronting and dismantling them. Therefore, a decolonial approach to writing indigenous experiences begins with transparency about the researcher’s own positionality. The emerging perspectives of this volume are contextual, highlighting the need for a critical reading for emerging, transformative and alternative visions in human relations and social structures.

This book explores the peacebuilding ideas and experiences of Maasai and Gusii women of faith in Kenya. Women of faith across the world have long demonstrated their leadership in peacebuilding. They have achieved this despite their underrepresentation in formal peacebuilding systems and the persistent lack of consideration for their critical contributions, and in the face of insecurity and violence against their very bodies. Their efforts include daily practices of sharing resources, building social cohesion, promoting human relations, and interlinking psychological, social, political, and spiritual encounters. This book provides a gender-responsive peacebuilding framework that leverages the intersectionality of women’s diverse identities and roles as they navigate both secular and religious spaces for peace. The book will appeal to researchers and teachers as well as practitioners and activists.

This book offers a unique and timely political analysis of war, international law and human rights, and the important interconnections among them. It questions why war features as a foundational problem in contemporary world affairs and explores how international law is used to manage this and other types of political violence. Challenging conventional thinking that understands war as a problem to be solved and law as an antidote to organized but unruly violence, this book situates the promotion and protection of human rights within the wider context of the modernist project, particularly during the epoch of the Anthropocene. Taking a critical perspective that draws on concepts found in the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, this book casts new light on the ways in which the politics of war, law and rights produces profound insecurities for the human species as well as for other life forms and life systems on this planet.

This book provides a novel account of the role of human rights discourse in the US foreign policy. The book analyses the US State Department’s Annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices as a means to monopolise and, more importantly, legitimise a specific framing of the human rights agenda to further US foreign policy. The US agenda’s deviation from established international human rights standards has very serious implications considering the preponderant global influence exercised by the US. Furthermore, more recently, the reports have added a separate section on „corruption“ as a human rights issue. “Corruption”, a controversial concept from the outset, is understood in a narrow way as a public sector issue that largely prevails in and subverts the so-called developing and transition countries. This book shows how this recent inclusion ultimately serves the US global neoliberal imperialist agenda and becomes the hegemonic discourse in international organisations.

The book provides an up to date and authoritative account of how the UN is re[1]thinking its obligations to protect civilians during conflicts. Based on hundreds of interviews with senior UN officials and humanitarian protection staff in headquarters and in the field and a review of the UN´s ´grey literature´. It also draws on the author´s own experience of working on human rights and protection in some of the world´s most violent conflicts. It is written not about what the UN ought to do – or how it could have behaved differently in an abstract or theoretically ideal world – but what the UN is actually doing to fulfil the fundamental purposes set forth in its Charter.