Asserting a critical sociological perspective, Human Rights Praxis and the Struggle for Survival reveals the contested historical processes through which fundamental human needs are constructed as “rights” under international law, and how those rights are confronted by the ruling relations and crises inherent to contemporary global capitalism and the waning American hegemonic world order. Put simply, the book explores why human rights as a formal legal project has failed to deliver on guaranteeing human survival, let alone universal human dignity. Rather than stopping at critique, the authors propose a specific, materialist intellectual and political agenda for the preservation of collective human survival that can achieve the historically unique notions of common humanity and human emancipation. The authors build on previous work, further developing the sociology of human rights as a distinct field at the intersection of Social Sciences and International Law. They take on several provocative theoretical debates, such as those over connections between racism and capitalism; the existence of a global or “transnational” police state; the control, growth, and exploitation of migrants/migration; and the complex relationship between political repression and various forms of domination. Human Rights Praxis and the Struggle for Survival offers critical analysis of contemporary politics and options for students, scholars, organizers, and stakeholders to grapple with some of the most pressing social problems of human history.

Care and the City is a cross-disciplinary collection of chapters examining urban social spaces, in which caring and uncaring practices intersect and shape people’s everyday lives. While asking how care and uncare are embedded in the urban condition, the book focuses on inequalities in caring relations and the ways they are acknowledged, reproduced, and overcome in various spaces, discourses, and practices. This book provides a pathway for urban scholars to start engaging with approaches to conceptualize care in the city through a critical-reflexive analysis of processes of urbanization. It pursues a systematic integration of empirical, methodological, theoretical, and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, while overcoming a crisis-centered reading of care and the related ambivalences in care debates, practices, and spaces. These strands are elaborated via a conceptual framework of care and situated within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban development with detailed case studies from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. By establishing links to various fields of knowledge, this book seeks to systematically introduce debates on care to the interconnecting fields of urban studies, planning theory, and related disciplines for the first time.

Why do powerful states like the U.S., U.K., China, and Russia repeatedly fail to meet their international legal obligations as defined by human rights instruments? How does global capitalism affect states’ ability to implement human rights, particularly in the context of global recession, state austerity, perpetual war, and environmental crisis? How are political and civil rights undermined as part of moves to impose security and surveillance regimes? This book presents a framework for understanding human rights as a terrain of struggle over power between states, private interests, and organized, “bottom-up” social movements. The authors develop a critical sociology of human rights focusing on the concept of the human rights enterprise: the process through which rights are defined and realized. While states are designated arbiters of human rights according to human rights instruments, they do not exist in a vacuum. Political sociology helps us to understand how global neoliberalism and powerful non-governmental actors (particularly economic actors such as corporations and financial institutions) deeply affect states’ ability and likelihood to enforce human rights standards. This book offers keen insights for understanding rights claims, and the institutionalization of, access to, and restrictions on human rights. It will be invaluable to human rights advocates, and undergraduate and graduate students across the social sciences.

The aim of the text is to respond to gaps in an emergent discourse running along minority/majority world fault lines through various perspectives linking globalization, education and human rights.

Globalization is not a new phenomenon in the international system. However, the various phases of globalization have had divergent scopes, actors, dimensions and dynamics – that is, each of the phases of globalization can be differentiated according to these terms. Against this background, this book focuses on the 'new globalization', a phase that emerged when the Cold War ended and which is, significantly, the most expansive and technologically advanced of all the phases of globalization. The contributors identify and discuss many of the frontier issues in Africa that are being impacted by the dynamics of this new globalization – debt, human rights, development, state sovereignty, the environment, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The volume will hold particular interest for students, scholars and researchers of African and development politics.

Human rights advocacy in the West is changing. Before the turn of the century, access to goods such as food, housing, and health care—while essential to human survival—were deemed outside of the human rights sphere. Traditional human rights institutions focused on rights in the political arena that could be defended through legal systems. In Freedom from Poverty, Daniel P. L. Chong examines how today's nongovernmental organizations are modifying human rights practices and reshaping the political landscape by taking up the cause of subsistence rights. This book outlines how three types of NGOs—human rights, social justice, and humanitarian organizations—are breaking down barriers by incorporating access to economic and social goods into national laws and advancing subsistence rights through nonjuridical means. These NGOs are using rights not only as legal instruments but as moral and rhetorical implements to build social movements, shape political culture, and guide development work. Rights language is now invoked in churches, political campaigns, rock concerts, and organizational mission statements. Chong presents a social theory of human rights to provide a framework for understanding these changes and defending the legitimacy of these rights. Freedom from Poverty analyzes new trends in the evolution of human rights by combining constructivist and postpositivist legal approaches. This book provides valuable concepts to human rights practitioners, political scientists, antipoverty advocates, and leaders who are serious about ending widespread privation and disease.

Report on a month-long debate on various social problems faced by researchers in Asia.

The book develops a practical approach to public policy issues that have continued to be intractable because of a lack of emphasis on transcultural understanding. Sustained examples help to increase the readability and the accessibility of theory and methodology. The key themes address the issue that: -Management needs to be more systemic. Critical Systemic Praxis is the process whereby we find ways to work across discipline areas and sectoral areas, in order to address complex social, political, economic and environmental problems. -The way we define and address problems depends on an ability to work with, rather than within knowledge areas. -By introducing the notion of governance we can extend traditional management from an organisational context to an inter-organisational context and locate governance as the goal for sustainable social and environmental justice. The core aspects of praxis are: -Respectful listening and dialogue to set up appropriate contexts for participatory design. -Participatory designs based on participatory action research to map tacit and explicit knowledge of participants (professional and ordinary citizens). -Strategic decision making across discipline areas, cultural contexts and knowledge areas. -Action learning to transfer the policy and practice learnings. -Mainstreaming the approach to governance in the social, political, economic and environmental sectors. The book develops a systemic approach to public policy issues. Examples are used throughout to exemplify theory. The integrated approach to policy and practice is ideally suited to addressing the socio-economic and environmental issues.

This book examines dominant discourses in human rights education globally. Using diverse paradigms, ranging from critical theory to discourse analysis, the book examines major human rights education reforms and policy issues in a global culture, with a focus on the ambivalent and problematic relationship between human rights education discourses, ideology and the state. The book discusses democracy, ideology and human rights, which are among the most critical and significant factors defining and contextualising the processes surrounding human rights education globally. The book critiques current human rights education practices and policy reforms, illustrating the shifts in the relationship between the state, ideology, and human rights education policy. Written by authors from diverse backgrounds and regions, the book examines current developments in research concerning human rights education. The book enables readers to gain a more holistic understanding of the nexus between human rights education, and dominant ideologies, both locally and globally. It also provides an easily accessible, practical yet scholarly insights into international concerns in the field of human rights education in the context of global culture.

Latino Civil Rights in Education: La Lucha Sigue documents the experiences of historical and contemporary advocates in the movement for civil rights in education of Latinos in the United States. These critical narratives and counternarratives discuss identity, inequality, desegregation, policy, public school, bilingual education, higher education, family engagement, and more, comprising an ongoing effort to improve the conditions of schooling for Latino children. Featuring the perspectives and research of Latino educators, sociologists, historians, attorneys, and academics whose lives were guided by this movement, the book holds broad applications in the study and continuation of social justice and activism today.