David F. Suárez

Education Professionals and the Construction of Human Rights Education

The UN Decade for Human Rights Education began in 1995, and since that time many nations have reported activities and programs in line with the decade (United Nations 1998; UNHCHR 2005). While 1995 was a pivotal year in the history of human rights education, the curricular movement neither began nor ended with the UN Decade. Human rights education has been developing for several decades, and efforts to introduce human rights into formal school curricula have included diverse and ongoing activities by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and dedicated individuals throughout the world. Beyond advocating for human rights education in schools, the actors involved in promoting human rights education also have been involved in creating and developing a curricular movement. This article builds on previous comparative education research by analyzing the current discourse surrounding this emerging education model— human rights education. The first section provides a brief history of human rights education in formal education. The second section reviews research on international reforms, emphasizing analyses of processes in global diffusion and variation at national or local levels. Closely related, the third section discusses linkages and relational and associational processes that spread ideas and construct new models such as human rights education. The fourth section focuses on the current state of human rights education, ex-

Civic Engagement and Nonprofit Lobbying in California, 1998-2003

Which types of nonprofit organizations make claims to the state by lobbying and what explains their involvement in the activity? Although many studies focus on organization-level characteristics, the authors argue that nonprofit lobbying is driven by two different dynamics that operate at the field level: cross-sector competition and social change mission. Analyzing data on nonprofit organizations in California from 1998 to 2003, the authors show that nonprofits in mission-driven fields are more likely to lobby than nonprofits in other fields, but cross-sector competition does not seem to influence lobbying at the field level. The authors also find that many organization-level characteristics matter and nonprofits with lobbying experience tend to make the activity a regular component of their organizational repertoire. These findings have a variety of implications for work on civic engagement and the authors conclude with a discussion of the implications.

Street Credentials and Management Backgrounds: Careers of Nonprofit Executives in an Evolving Sector

The nonprofit sector is confronting a potential leadership deficit and mounting pressures to become more efficient and businesslike. To begin to assess how these tensions influence pathways to leadership, this study investigates the professional backgrounds and nonprofit experience of leaders in the sector. Analysis demonstrates that some leaders have management credentials and management experience, but many advance in the nonprofit sector through substantive experience alone. Even though some nonprofit executives have spent most of their careers in the public sector or the business sector, the study also demonstrates that a nonprofit ethic matters a great deal for leadership. These findings suggest that substantive experience and dedication to the nonprofit sector constitute primary pathways to leadership in the sector, raising many questions about the role of management expertise and the evolution of leadership in the sector.

Nonprofit Advocacy and Civic Engagement on the Internet

This study extends prior work on the social role of nonprofits by investigating Web site use for e-advocacy and e-democracy (civic engagement). Building from interviews with 200 nonprofit executive directors, results reveal that rights groups, environmental organizations, and policy entrepreneurs are consistently likely to mention advocacy and promote civic engagement on their Web sites. By contrast, funding structure and resource dependence generally fail to explain nonprofit use of Web sites for social purposes, suggesting that external controls may not constrain nonprofits. In light of these results, the study concludes with an agenda for future research on the relationship between civic engagement and advocacy.

UNESCO and the Associated Schools Project: Symbolic Affirmation of World Community, International Understanding, and Human Rights

The UNESCO Associated Schools Project emphasizes world community, human rights, and international understanding. This article investigates the emergence and global diffusion of the project from 1953 to 2001, estimating the influence of national, regional, and world characteristics on the likelihood of a country adopting a UNESCO school. It also addresses the effects of national linkages to the international human rights regime. The results reveal that adoption rates are positively influenced by stronger national links to the human rights regime throughout the period and that various measures of the density of global society influence adoption, particularly after the institutionalization of human rights. Finally, the results demonstrate that democratic countries and nations with more expanded educational systems tend to adopt a UNESCO school before the period of human rights institutionalization. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the literature on the global environment and the diffusion of innovations in education.

Human Rights and Curricular Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Human rights have become increasingly salient for nations, organizations, and individuals since the end of World War II (Lauren 2003). Discussions of human rights now are common in formal education, including in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Many countries have reformed curricular guidelines, textbooks, and even teacher training courses to include human rights topics. A variety of indicators suggest that countries in Latin America have integrated human rights into the curriculum more rapidly than countries in the Caribbean. However, few researchers have investigated the relationship between education and human rights. Moreover, little attention has been given to the incorporation of global and universal rights in school curricula, a movement that challenges education’s master narrative emphasizing national citizenship rights and loyalty to the nation-state (Bendix 1964; Tyack and Cuban 1995). In the early eighteenth century, when it became possible to imagine the nation-state as an abstract entity (Anderson 1983), mass education emerged as the primary vehicle for creating national citizens (Tyack 1966; Meyer et al. 1992; Romero 2001). Thus, education has tended to emphasize socialization and duties or obligations to the national polity, often attempting to reorient racial, class, ethnic, or religious identities toward a broader identi-

Rewriting Citizenship? Civic Education in Costa Rica and Argentina.

To what degree are nations ‘rewriting’ citizenship by expanding discussions of human rights, diversity and cultural pluralism in modern civic education, and what explains variation between countries? This study addresses these issues by analysing the intended content of civic education in Costa Rica and Argentina. Over time, civic education in both countries has become more focused on rights and the empowerment of individuals. In addition, both countries embrace aspects of global citizenship through an affirmation of human rights. Citizenship thus expands outward and upward, incorporating more groups and people into the national polity while also broadening the concept of citizenship beyond the nation‐state. Nevertheless, Costa Rica and Argentina vary in the intensity of the adoption of global citizenship, most likely a result of divergent historical experiences with state sponsored violence.

The Flow of Management Practices: An Analysis of NGO Monitoring and Evaluation Dynamics

Which characteristics of NGOs are associated with the adoption of modern management practices and to what extent have those practices become standardized? Based on a national sample of 135 international and local NGOs operating in Cambodia, we address these questions by analyzing the dynamics of “monitoring and evaluation” (M&E), a term used to describe a broad range of activities that NGOs undertake to track, understand, and assess their work. We provide an overview of monitoring and evaluation in a developing country setting, investigate the factors associated with more extensive (or sophisticated) M&E using multivariate analysis, and look at how M&E practices vary between local and international NGOs. Findings demonstrate that professionalization, resource dependence, and social embeddedness all play important roles in explaining the activities of NGOs operating in Cambodia. The analysis also suggests that the flow of management practices in the NGO sector differs for local and international actors.

Professionalizing a Global Social Movement: Universities and Human Rights

Research on the human rights movement emphasizes direct changes in nation-states, focusing on the efficacy of treaties and the role of advocacy in mitigating immediate violations. However, more than 140 universities in 59 countries established academic chairs, research centers, and programs for human rights from 1968–2000, a development that highlights the diffuse penetration of the social movement into core domains of society. We investigate this process with event history models, finding that countries embedded in the human rights regime and countries with dense civil society linkages to the human rights movement are particularly likely to develop a university human rights program. We also find that the structuration of the global human rights regime has an independent positive influence on the rate of country adoption, but national human rights violations, social unrest, and indicators of modernization or development are less salient.

The Institutionalization of Human Rights Education

Human rights education (HRE) is a professional field and a developing curricular movement that combines work in human rights and education. A variety of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) endorse teaching human rights, an increasing number of national governments incorporate human rights content in formal school curriculum, and many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the world train teachers, produce teaching manuals, and advocate for HRE in schools. While the movement dates back at least to the 1970s, in 1995 the United Nations initiated a Decade for Human Rights Education and formally defined HRE as “training, dissemination, and information efforts aimed at the building of a universal culture of human rights through the imparting of knowledge and skills and the moulding of attitudes” (United Nations, 1998, p. 3).