Claude E. Welch

The Ogoni and Self-Determination: Increasing Violence in Nigeria

The execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, noted advocate of rights for the Ogoni people of the Niger delta, who was hanged with eight of his colleagues in Port Harcourt on 10 November 1995, drew universal condemnation from governments, human rights organisations, and literary figures. Following the trial of these Ogoni activists, the Nigerian regime headed by General Sani Abacha decided that the verdict of the appointed tribunal should be endorsed and implemented without delay, despite an international campaign for clemency. In the view of many, Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike, an independent judicial court would not have found the accused guilty of the murder in May 1994 of the four prominent Ogoni who had been killed during a riotous rally. For the military administration, however, the claims for self-determination made by Saro-Wiwa had run counter to national policy, nOt least by having highlighted long-standing tensions between the countrys ethnic mosaic and its political centralisation.

Military Disengagement from Politics: Paradigms, Processes, or Random Events

Although no paradigm for the study of military disengagement from politics and subsequent liberalization and democratization has emerged and been widely embraced by scholars, patterns have been discerned in regionally based analyses. The article examines common themes (abrupt versus phased withdrawal, impact of professionalism, attitudes of senior officers, levels of national unity, and the effect of rapid delegitimation on military governments), areas of disagreement (military training and mission, economic factors, internal disorder, and gradual versus revolutionary change), and areas for further research (intra-military attitudes, political culture, and hypothesis-testing case studies).

Praetorianism in Commonwealth West Africa

You must have confidence that the Government is doing what is best for the country, and support it without question or criticism. It is not the duty of a soldier to criticise or endeavour to interfere in any way with the political affairs of the country; he must leave that to the politicians, whose business it is. The Government expects you, under all circumstances, to serve it and the people of Ghana loyally. KWAME NKRUMAH, to the cadets of the Ghana Military Academy, May 1961

Economic Rights in Canada and the United States

Introduction: Looking at Ourselves -Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann and Claude E. Welch, Jr. PART I. PHILOSOPHY, LAW, AND POLITICS OF ECONOMIC RIGHTS Justifying Socioeconomic Rights -Brian Orend 2. International Law of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: A U.S. Perspective -David Weissbrodt 3. On the Margins of the Human Rights Discourse: Foreign Policy and International Welfare Rights -David P. Forsythe and Eric A. Heinze PART II. POVERTY 4. Homelessness in Canada and the United States -Barbara Wake Carroll 5. Welfare Racism and Human Rights -Kenneth J. Neubeck 6. The Movement to End Poverty in the United States -Mary Bricker-Jenkins and Willie Baptist PART III. CONTENTIOUS AND EMERGING ISSUES 7. So Close and Yet so Different: The Right to Health Care in the United States and Canada -Virginia A. Leary 8. International Labor Rights and North American Labor Law -James B. Atleson 9. Deconstructing Barriers: The Promise of Socioeconomic Rights for People with Disabilities in Canada -Sarah Armstrong, Mindy Noble, and Pauline Rosenbaum 10. The Economic Rights of Migrants and Immigrant Workers in Canada and the United States -Vic Satzewich PART IV. A EUROPEAN COMPARISON 11. The Netherlands: A Walhalla of Economic and Social Rights? -Peter R. Baehr Appendix 1. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Appendix 2. Excerpts from President Franklin Delano Roosevelts State of the Union Address, January 6, 1941 Appendix 3. Excerpts from President Franklin Delano Roosevelts State of the Union Address, January 11, 1944 Abbreviations Contributors Notes Index Acknowledgments

The Right of Association in Ghana and Tanzania

Among the rights promised to individuals and groups, the ‘right of association’ frequently appears. It is enshrined in national constitutions, in international declarations and conventions, and in standard references to the liberties and privileges that citizens enjoy. Yet, as this article will illustrate, restrictions on this right have been justified in the name of higher objectives. The right of association, it would appear, is a conditional or second-order right, subordinated on occasion to more pressing rights. The strains of recent independence, regionalism, and labour unrest have brought about limits to the creation of association, whether political or non-political in nature.

Military Intervention in Africa

During the Nigerian civil war. Punch published a four-panel cartoon whose simplicity elegantly portrayed a common view of Africa’s future. The first panel depicted an outline map of the continent; the second showed another outline map, this one inscribed with colonial frontiers. Panel 3 contained the outline map, crisscrossed with a crazy-quilt of borders. The final panel showed a heap of fragments at the bottom, the continent having disintegrated. Cartoonists enjoy the liberty to lampoon or to caricature, yet their exaggerations must be based on fact, or on a shared perception of fact. By the year 2000, will the cartoonist’s version, widely shared when printed, have become reality?

Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective (review)

B O O K R E V EW S 16 scholarship differs from environmental history written especially about the Unites States in that in it focuses on social history grounded within changing landscapes. Anderson’s emphasis on local knowledge captures, without overly romanticizing, the ability of African communities, such as the Tugen and II Chamus, to utilize storehouses of experiences in the face of changing conditions. Communities like these seek fi rst to wrest a living from the land, and Africanist scholarship for the most part keeps this dynamic at the center of its lens. Environmental history outside Africa often comes across as a history of landscape itself, but African environmental history places the people inside that landscape. Gregory H. Maddox Texas Southern University

The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (review)

Thomas takes on two goals in this ambitious study. First, he seeks to show how major international relations theories fall short in explaining the extraordinary changes (primarily in Eastern and Central Europe) from the late 1960s to 1989. Second, and in support of his primarily theoretical concern, he analyzes diplomatic maneuverings during this extended period. Neither task is easy. In a nutshell, however, Thomas provides both in a fashion that provides interesting insights into “soft law” and its place in the evolution of global human rights values and practices. Thomas sets forth his basic assertion as follows: “. . . repressive states agree to be bound by human rights norms in the belief that they can gain international legitimacy without substantial compliance, and . . . this ‘empty’ commitment nonetheless promotes local, transnational, and interstate processes that undermine continued repression.”1 Nearly 300 pages later, the reader has received a quick review of Realist theory (which treats human rights norms as irrelevant), far more thorough discussions of Liberal and Constructivist theory (about which more at the end of this review), and detailed, largely chronological analysis of diplomatic negotiations and NGO pressures prior to and especially following the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. World War II ended without a comprehensive peace settlement for Europe. Contending economic and military blocs emerged: COMECON versus the EEC; NATO versus the Warsaw Pact. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, essentially no steps were taken to bridge the gap. The Cold War and the Iron Curtain were grim reminders of the division between two antagonist systems, each with a dominant superpower. What became the Helsinki Final Act grew from the multi-year Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (over two and a half years; 337 official negotiating sessions, thousands of hours of work, and “considerable exercise of diplomatic skill and muscle” for the ten principles; 761 negotiating sessions for Basket III, in which human rights is placed, Thomas notes.2 Two principles fundamentally concerned leaders of the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries: inviolability of frontiers and non-intervention in international affairs. The West—though far more of the countries of the European Community than the United States under Nixon and Kissinger—concentrated on respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as family reunification and freedom of movement and information. Since the rules of negotiation required that consensus be reached, and since issues of deep importance to both camps were involved, negotiations were long, frustrating, and complex. Thomas does a good job in tracing them in the first two chapters, combining the emergence of human rights norms with a summary of close to three years’ intermittent yet intense negotiation resulting in the Helsinki Accords. As he concludes,

NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "A Curious Grapevine", and: Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (review)

The year 1998 brought a bumper crop of books on human rights. The fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) provided the impetus to rethink how the world has changed, thanks to the UDHR. Obviously, the quality and depth of these books varied markedly. Most sank with nary a notice in the August pages of this journal, but some, including those reviewed here, deserve summary, commentary, and praise. NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a sprawling study of the origins and accomplishments of nongovernmental organizations (largely USbased). William Korey documents their effectiveness “in making human rights a vibrant and major force on the agenda of international diplomacy and discourse.”1 He argues that a coalescence of national and nongovernmental interests is most likely to bring change. Hence, shifts in American foreign policy and changes in global consciousness brought by NGO pressure are central to NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Activists Beyond Borders is a comparative work, with the majority of its pages devoted to analysis of networks active in Latin America, in promoting environmental advocacy, or in combating violence against women. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink do not describe individual NGOs in detail, as Korey does; rather, they illustrate more general arguments about groups of NGOs with pithy examples. For them, the webs of connections human rights groups have formed constitute the heart of their story. In showing why these networks formed and how these networks succeed, Keck and Sikkink have advanced theoretical analysis. Korey, too, is well aware of the importance of links among human rights NGOs. The unusual subtitle Korey utilizes stems from the noted first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt used the “curious grapevine” metaphor when the UN’s Third Committee finished its discussion of the draft UDHR on 7 December 1948. Exactly seven years after the “day of infamy” her husband had decried, Mrs. Roosevelt presciently asserted that a “curious grapevine” would carry word of the Declaration throughout the world. Information, she continued, “may seep in even when governments are not so anxious for it.”2 “Network” says the same thing, albeit in less striking language. In