This book draws attention to emerging issues around the rights of minorities, marginalized groups, and persons in Africa. It explores the gaps between human rights provisions and conditions, showing that although international human rights principles have been embraced in the continent, various minority groups and marginalized persons are denied such rights through criminalization and persecution. African countries have a good record of signing and ratifying international and regional rights instruments but the political will and capacity for enforcing these with respect to minorities remain weak. International contributors to the book provide new perspectives on the rights of marginalized and minority groups in different parts of Africa and the extent to which they are deprived or denied entitlement to the universality and equality articulated in law. The authors show that human rights, while having come of age as a moral ideal, has not been fully entrenched in practice towards groups such as children, indigenous populations, the mentally ill, persons with disabilities, and persons with albinism. This volume is geared toward scholars, students, human rights groups, policy makers, social workers, international organizations, and policy makers in the fields of criminology, security studies, development studies, political science, sociology, children studies, social psychology, international relations, postcolonial studies, and African Studies.

More than just an opportunity to uncover fact after conflict, truth commissions can also offer restorative power to nations across the globe. Truth Commissions and State Building presents the first comparative study of the role of its kind, illuminating these possibilities. Examining truth commissions as mechanisms for civic inclusion, identity formation, institutional reform, and nation (re)building in post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies, the book shifts attention towards institutional innovation in African countries, where approximately a third of all commissions have been established. Contributors explore the mandates, methods, outcomes, and legacies of truth commissions, analyzing their place in transitional and restorative justice. Rather than conceptualizing state building as incidental to their work, they present it as an intrinsic, central component. This flagship volume – authored by a stellar cast of policymakers, practitioners, and scholars – brings multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral perspectives to bear on the complex role of truth commissions in addressing transitional justice, historical injustices, and present-day human rights violations. As more countries, in both the Global South and the North, adopt this model to address historical and contemporary abuses, the dialogue between different sectors of society modelled here will help inform this process – wherever it might occur.

This book addresses the lack of current research concerning disadvantage using an entrepreneurial ecosystem lens, and the failure of entrepreneurship policy to widen engagement in entrepreneurship for disadvantaged people and places.

Over the course of his distinguished career, legal scholar Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im has sought to reconcile his identity as a Muslim with his commitment to universal human rights. In Muslims and Global Justice, he advances the theme of global justice from an Islamic perspective, critically examining the role that Muslims must play in the development of a pragmatic, rights-based framework for justice. An-Na'im opens this collection of essays with a chapter on Islamic ambivalence toward political violence, showing how Muslims began grappling with this problem long before the 9/11 attacks. Other essays highlight the need to improve the cultural legitimacy of human rights in the Muslim world. As An-Na'im argues, in order for a commitment to human rights to become truly universal, we must learn to accommodate a range of different reasons for belief in those rights. In addition, the author contends, building an effective human rights framework for global justice requires that we move toward a people-centered approach to rights. Such an approach would value foremost empowering local actors as a way of negotiating the paradox of a human rights system that relies on self-regulation by the state. Encompassing over two decades of An-Na'im's work on these critical issues, Muslims and Global Justice provides a valuable theoretical approach to the challenge of realizing global justice in a world of profound religious and cultural difference.

This book provides a rich analysis of the actors and organizations to reflect on the antecedents and trajectories of terrorism and insurgency in South Asia, and the different countermeasures adopted by the countries to deal with the security and developmental challenges. South Asia is a complex geography that has been both a victim and a playing field for indigenous insurgencies, and domestic and transnational terrorist movements. The contributors to this volume explore how this situation has posed serious challenges to the sovereignty of the states, to national and human security, and to the socioeconomic fabric of the communities, and to the ethnic and religious cohesion. The book provides detailed studies of country cases on terrorism, security, and insurgencies, and it underlines the national, regional, and global implications of the threats that emanate from this region. Presenting an opportunity to diversify away from a Western-centric focus on terrorism and security, this book will be valuable to researchers in political science, criminology, defense and security studies, and to policy makers and think tanks.

The crisis of Northern capitalism and failure of hegemonic global governance have created a facilitative environment for post-hegemonic initiatives promoting South–South cooperation. Major Southern countries – especially the BRICS – have taken the lead in pushing for alternative governance mechanisms that are strongly articulated in the areas of economic, financial, cultural, and defense cooperation. This book focuses on the historical, political-economic, and geopolitical context in which major Southern countries implement a post-hegemonic agenda. Providing a global and comprehensive perspective through a series of focused case studies from Europe, Latin America, Eurasia, and Africa, the author develops a new approach to the multipolarization of world politics based on "global hegemony". Highly recommended for scholars, students, and activists involved in global political economy, regionalism studies, and international development, this book will be of interest to anyone seeking to develop their understanding of world politics and South–South cooperation.

With a range of well-respected voices from across the business, political, third sector and research spectrum, this important book provides an accessible insight into responsible leadership. It represents the most comprehensive and informed work on responsible leadership linked to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) produced to date. This carefully edited volume, based on a collaborative partnership between the Institute for Responsible Leadership (IRL) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), contains twenty chapters in seven parts which address the relationship between responsible leadership and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These original and accessible contributions discuss progress in a variety of areas relevant to the goals, including climate change and biodiversity, global health, cybercrime, human trafficking, corporate social responsibility, gender, education and social cohesion. The world-leading expert contributors are drawn from a wide range of societies and continents and cover key aspects of responsible leadership in a lively and impactful fashion. This book is for leaders at every level in the public, private and third sectors, students concerned with responsible leadership, academics and researchers studying leadership in different disciplinary fields, and all those committed to sustainable development and progressing the UN SDGs.

Exploring to what extent the BRICS group is a significant actor challenging the global order, this book focuses on the degree and consequence of their emergence and explores how important cooperation is to individual BRICS members’ foreign policy strategies and potential relevance as leaders in regional and global governance. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) have come to play an important role on the global political scene. As a group, and as individual countries, they have taken initiatives to establish new institutions, and have engaged in yearly summits that coordinate their voice and focus on intra-BRICS cooperation. In this sense, the BRICS may be seen as a "balancing coalition", and often the main opposing force to Western powers. Looking at the debate around the role of the BRICS as an actor, expert contributors also explore the international political economy (IPE) of individual BRICS countries as systemically important countries with highly asymmetrical individual power capacities. The comprehensive theoretical and empirical coverage of this timely volume will be especially useful to students, researchers and professionals interested in ongoing academic debates around the IPE of emerging powers, and those researching global governance and globalization.

Africa throughout its postcolonial history has been plagued by human rights abuses ranging from intolerance of political dissent to heinous crimes such as genocide. Yet this book argues that the continent has also been pivotal in helping shape contemporary human rights norms and practices.

This publication presents African social, historical and cross continental perspectives on Chinese invlovement in Africa.