Shareen Hertel

Human rights in the United States : beyond exceptionalism

Foreword: are Americans human? Reflections on the future of progressive politics in the United States Dorothy Q. Thomas 1. Paradoxes and possibilities: domestic human rights policy in context Kathryn Libal and Shareen Hertel Part I. Structuring Debates, Institutionalizing Rights: 2. The yellow sweatshirt: human dignity and economic human rights in advanced industrialized democracies Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann 3. The welfare state: a battleground for human rights Mimi Abramovitz 4. Drawing lines in the sand: building economic and social rights in the United States Cathy Albisa 5. State and local commissions as sites for domestic human rights implementation Risa Kaufman Part II. Challenging Public/Private Divides: 6. The curious resistance to seeing domestic violence as a human rights violation in the United States Sally Engle Merry and Jessica Shimmin 7. At the crossroads: childrens rights and the US government Jonathan Todres 8. Entrenched inequity: healthcare in the United States Jean Connolly Carmalt, Sarah Zaidi and Alicia Ely Yamin 9. Business and human rights: a new approach to advancing environmental justice in the United States Joanne Bauer Part III. From the Margins to the Center: Making Harms Visible through Human Rights Framing: 10. The law and politics of US participation in the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities Michael Ashley Stein and Janet E. Lord 11. The anomaly of citizenship for indigenous rights Bethany R. Berger 12. Human rights violations as obstacles to escaping poverty: the case of lone mother-headed families Ken Neubeck 13. The human rights of children in conflict with the law: lessons for the US human rights movement Mie Lewis 14. LGBT rights as human rights in the United States: opportunities lost Julie Mertus 15. No shelter: disaster politics in Louisiana and the struggle for human rights Davida Finger and Rachel E. Luft.

Information, Choice and Political Consumption: Human Rights in the Checkout Lane

Politically motivated consumption behaviors (such as boycotts) are a significant source of human rights mobilization, yet the roots of individual consumption decisions are under-explored in the human rights literature. This article uses original national survey data to evaluate key factors that influence individual decisions to stop purchasing products for broader social purposes, highlighting the role that personal interest, access to particular types of information, and a sense of efficacy play in shaping the decision to consume ethically.

Economic Rights: The Terrain

Economic rights are central to the international human rights regime, even if they have received less attention historically (at least in the West). This chapter, and the volume from which it is drawn, investigates the central conceptual, measurement, and policy issues confronting economic rights. While many important aspects remain to be addressed, conceiving problems in terms of economic rights may provide novel, effective ways to reduce world poverty, and to enhance respect for human dignity.

Human Rights in the United States: Paradoxes and Possibilities: Domestic Human Rights Policy in Context

The United States of America was founded on the principle of equality through law, even if this ideal has not always been realized. Indeed, the struggle to realize equality and full participation in society and governance is a perennial theme in U.S. history. At various junctures, realizing this ideal has been challenging, especially in the face of war, economic crises, or social unrest. Nowhere is this more evident than today, when growing opposition (both at the grassroots level and among political elites) to “big government” and “judicial activism” threatens to significantly limit the capacity of the state to address discrimination and social inequality. This opposition has sharpened in the wake of economic recession, heightened national security concerns, and rising nativism. Human rights could provide a useful tool for addressing these challenges. Human rights are grounded in the notion of human dignity, and they obligate the state to assure the protection and provision of a full range of political, civil, economic, social, and cultural rights. Why, then, are human rights not central to discussions of public policy and legal reform in the United States? After all, the United States played an instrumental role both in founding the modern human rights regime in the immediate aftermath of World War II and in championing human rights as a foreign policy priority at various junctures over the ensuing six decades. Yet many politicians, civil servants, members of the judiciary, academics, and pundits have long insisted that international human rights norms do not apply (or apply in only a limited manner) to the crafting, implementation, or evaluation of U.S. domestic laws and public policy. American citizens have tended instead to frame their grievances over

Field Research in Developing Countries: Hitting the Road Running

heavailabilityofrelativelyreliableandcompa-rabledataonlineandtheincreasingemphasisonstatisticalandformalresearchmethodshasledmanypoliticalscientiststodismissresearchin foreign countries as a waste of time andmoney.Weleavethatdebatetoothers(see,e.g.,ComparativePoliticsOrganizedSection2005;QualitativeMethodsOrga-nizedSection2004).Instead,weoffersuggestionsformaxi-mizing the contributions of fieldwork to the production oforiginalresearch.Wepayparticularattentiontoresearchindevelopingcountriesowingtotheuniquechallengesofunder-takingresearchthere,butwebelieveourinsightsareapplica-bletofieldresearchmoregenerally.Thisarticleisbasedonaworkshopwedesignedtoprovidepracticaladviceforgraduatestudentsandtosteerthemtowardexistingresourcesonthetopic.Wecovertheidentificationofshort-andlong-termgoals,thenecessarystepstoprepareforaproductivefieldvisit,theschedulingandconductofper-sonalinterviews,thechallengesoffocusgroupsandpartici-pantobservation,theobligationandopportunitytofacilitateaccesstoyourresearchresultsinyourfieldsite,aswellaspracticalandsecurityconsiderations.Throughoutthepiece,weareattunedtohowmultipleandoftenconflictingsourcesofidentitycaninhibitorinsomecasesenhancetheoverallexperienceoffieldworkinforeigncountries.Wespecificallyaddress power relations in interviews, focus groups, andfollow-upcommunicationwithinterviewees.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Looking Up From the Grassroots: An Economic Rights Analysis of Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann's Article, “Universal Women's Rights Since 1970”

Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann has written a characteristically expansive yet trenchant article, remarkable not only for its historical and theoretical breadth but also for her explicit commitment to avoid essentializing women’s experiences as she explains the evolution of universal women’s rights over the past four decades. Howard-Hassmann is at her strongest here in discussing culture and women’s rights, and I will not take up those portions of her argument in my response. Rather, my aim is to probe her formulation of women’s economic rights and argue for a more nuanced discussion of the impact of globalization on women’s economic rights than Howard-Hassmann offers here. Recent scholarly work has shown that forms of globalization differ significantly and, not surprisingly, have distinct influences on women’s overall economic well-being (Schram 2006; Sweeney 2007; Morgen, Acker, and Weigt 2010). Moreover, there is greater variation in the impact of globalization on countries at differing levels of development and on women who are differentially situated within them than Howard-Hassmann acknowledges. She argues that the more autonomy women enjoy the more power they have to choose whether to “resist or encourage globalization” (Howard-Hassmann this issue: 446). But this assertion elides critical differences among women and thus obscures a more potentially nuanced argument regarding women’s ability to advocate for forms of globalization that

Immigrant Farmworker Advocacy: The Dynamics of Organizing

This paper explores contemporary labor rights advocacy among Latino farmworkers and their allies in New York state, drawing on data from participant observation and field interviews conducted over nearly a decade (from 2000 to 2008). The principal finding is that power inequalities within advocacy networks constrain the actions of “weaker” members, who, in turn, respond with unconventional tactics of resistance within the networks themselves. This paper employs key mechanisms from the literature on transnational advocacy to explain these domestic-level interactions, demonstrating their portability from one level of analysis to another.

The State of Economic and Social Human Rights: The Right to Food: A Global Perspective

Introduction Global per capita food production has risen to unprecedented levels, yet the number of hungry people has increased. Hunger remains a pervasive reality in the world today: 925 million of the worlds nearly 7 billion people are undernourished, an increase of more than 135 million hungry people since 1995, according to the United Nations (UN) Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) (2010; FAO, Hunger Statistics). Today, someone in the world is dying of hunger or its complications every several minutes of every day (FAO 2010). Yet there are adequate food stocks available to feed the worlds population (Paarlberg 2010), and the right to food is recognized formally under international law as well as informally by popular demand as a fundamental human right. Indeed, realization of the right to food is essential to the fulfillment of other human rights. The right to life and the right to health are inextricably linked to the right to food. Hunger and undernourishment directly or indirectly account for more than half of the deaths in the world according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2000). Malnutrition turns common childhood diseases into killers; roughly half of the deaths due to diarrhea, malaria, pneumonia, and measles can be attributed to malnutrition (Black, Morris, and Bryce 2003; Bryce et al. 2005). Enjoyment of the right to food is contingent, in turn, upon the realization of the right to education and the right to work. Malnutrition impedes learning and psychosocial development (Pridmore 2007; Alaimo, Olson, and Frangillo 2001). Poor health and low education and skill development limit access to decent work that provides incomes above the poverty level.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights Scholarship in Latin America

Human rights are the focus of research and teaching in multiple fields including law, philosophy, political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, history, literature and public health. Human rights are also the focus of advocacy and on-the-ground investigation by activists affiliated with nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), labour unions and social movements. Scholars interested in rights-based issues thus often face a dual challenge: that of crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to explore human rights questions, and that of bridging the academic-practitioner divide.

A new route to norms evolution: insights from India’s right to food campaign

Abstract For over a decade, activists in India have waged a nationwide Right to Food (RTF) campaign aimed at highlighting persistent undernutrition in their country and galvanizing corresponding legal and administrative reform. This article draws on original interview data to demonstrate the process through which the campaign has forged a new and more robust interpretation of the RTF than that prevailing in international law and practice. It has done so by relying largely on domestic law, institutions, and networks rather than through ‘vernacularization’ of international norms or transnational advocacy. The campaign’s innovative conceptualization of the RTF along with the ongoing challenges it faces in attempting to influence the implementation of that right have broader implications for human rights theory and advocacy beyond India.