32 courses with the subject HRTS GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
HRTS GU4011Indigenous Rights and Settler Colonialism in North America3.00
Course Description This interdisciplinary course explores both the rights of Indigenous people in settler colonies as well as the complex historical and theoretical relationship between human rights and settler colonialism. We will pursue three lines of inquiry. The first critically explores how central political concepts of the international state system—sovereignty, property, territory, self-determination—entwine the histories of settler colonialism and human rights. The second charts the rise and mechanisms of the international Indigenous rights movement, in particular its activity at the United Nations leading to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, and its contributions to ongoing debates on environmental and climate justice, group rights, natural resources and territorial autonomy, and cultural rights. The third unit interrogates settler state responses to the movement for Indigenous human rights, such as cooptation, recognition, and apology. Through readings drawn from history, ethnography, political and critical theory, international relations, Native studies, law, and documents produced by intergovernmental organizations and NGOs, we will explore and deepen the tensions between human rights as a theory and practice and the political lives and aspirations of Indigenous peoples and activists. What technologies of rule—such as residential school systems and property law—do settler colonial states deploy to dispossess Indigenous peoples? How have Indigenous peoples used the international human rights regime to mobilize against such dispossession? How have these states resisted the global Indigenous rights movement? And can the human rights regime, rooted in the international state system, meaningfully contribute to anticolonial movements in liberal settler colonies? While we will touch on settler colonialism as it manifests around the globe, the course’s geographical focus will be on North America. Course objectives Throughout this course, you will: Develop a historically-informed understanding of both international indigenous rights and settler colonialism as idea, practice, institution, and discourse; Place the literature on human rights and settler colonialism into critical conversation in order to deepen existing conceptual problems and generate new ones; Identify the main arguments in theoretical texts, legal and policy documents, and public debates; Read and think across disciplines to develop arguments that speak to multiple scholarly communities; Produce an original argument in relation to other authors’ arguments, and construct and organize an analytical, argumentative paper; Communicate ideas effectively in class discussions and presentations; Bring case studies and questions encountered outside the course into the classroom to challenge or nuance the assigned material
HRTS GU4185HUMAN RIGHTS AND GLOBAL ECONOMIC JUSTICE3.00
The world economy is a patchwork of competing and complementary interests among and between governments, corporations, and civil society. These stakeholders at times cooperate and also conflict over issues of global poverty, inequality, and sustainability. What role do human rights play in coordinating the different interests that drive global economic governance? This seminar will introduce students to different structures of global governance for development, trade, labor, finance, the environment, migration, and intellectual property and investigate their relationship with human rights. Students will learn about public, private, and mixed forms of governance, analyze the ethical and strategic perspectives of the various stakeholders and relate them to existing human rights norms. The course will examine the work of multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and the International Financial Institutions, as well as international corporate and non-governmental initiatives
HRTS GU4195Topics in History, Memory and Transitional Justice3
How do societies address their “bad pasts” in order to create “good futures” in the aftermath of conflict, state-sponsored repression, dictatorship, and genocide? Transitional Justice has generated numerous strategic and tactical approaches for redressing often irreparable harms. These include: international criminal tribunals, national or local legal proceedings, truth commissions, restitution, the accurate revision of history, public apologies, the establishment of monuments and museums, and official commemorations. The aim of this course is to examine and analyze from a historical perspective the characteristics and problems of transitions from non-democratic/dictatorial/totalitarian/criminal political regimes to the beginnings of democracy and civil society. We shall focus on concepts and comparative cases, and current and past transitional justice-related questions, including historical reconciliation. We will study, among others, the experience of Germany at and after the Nuremberg proceedings, transitional justice in Africa, post-Soviet efforts at coming to terms with its Communist past, the ICTY/ICTR/ICC, amnesty and amnesia, and the legacy and memory of genocide and mass political repression. Students will gain a substantive framework for understanding the questions and challenges related to transitional justice today.
By connecting law, philosophy, and key human rights cases, this course will examine one of the main dilemmas in human rights theory and practice: the balance between equality and identity in the protection of rights. What forms of equality should be recognized to assure effective rights for all? What forms of identity should be recognized? Can there be effective human rights without an intersectional approach? Should we prioritize redistribution or recognition? What can we learn from cases developed in the UN System, in regional systems of human rights, and in specific countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe? How can we be effective human rights defenders in a growingly complex field? With these questions in mind, we will address different possibilities of protecting black women in the U.S. and Brazil, Muslim immigrants in Denmark, Indigenous women in Kenya and Canada, persons with disabilities in Tanzania, mothers with HIV in South Africa, poor workers in the Amazon Forest, abducted children in Argentina, and so forth. Learning objectives: • Overview of how equality in human rights is connected to the recognition of identities, or more specifically, to the recognition of an intersectional approach to rights • Understanding different forms of equality that can be advanced through human rights • Adopting a problem-solving approach to an increasingly complex field of human rights, in order to become more effective human rights advocates • Critically analyzing and getting acquainted with cases in the UN system, the regional systems of human rights, and domestic jurisdictions around the world
This class takes a social movement perspective to analyze and understand the international human rights movement. The course will address the evolution of the international human rights movement and focus on the NGOs that drive the movement on the international, regional and domestic levels. Sessions will highlight the experiences of major human rights NGOs and will address topics including strategy development, institutional representation, research methodologies, partnerships, networks, venues of engagement, campaigning, fundraising and, perhaps most importantly, the fraught and complex debates about adaptation to changing global circumstances, starting with the pre-Cold War period and including some of the most up-to-date issues and questions going on in this field today
Refugees, forced migration, and displacement: these subjects top the headlines of the world’s newspapers, not to mention our social media feeds. Over a million refugees have reached Europe’s shores in recent years, and conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere continue to force people to flee their homes. In the aftermath of the financial crisis and 9/11, politicians in the Global North have focused on borders: who crosses them and how. Walls are being erected. Referendums are being held. We are consumed with thorny questions about who gets to join our political communities. Today there are over 65 million refugees, displaced persons, and stateless persons in the world, represented at last summer’s Olympics by their own team for first the time, a testament to their increasing visibility on the world stage. Global forced displacement recently hit a historical high. And while numbers are increasing, solutions are still elusive. The modern refugee regime, the collection of laws and institutions designed to address the problems faced by refugees, has developed slowly over the course of the last 100 years, first in response to specific crises. That regime has been shaped by a changing geopolitical landscape. At the end of the Cold War, institutions in the field expanded their mandates and preferred solutions to the “problem” of refugees changed. And yet today many scholars and policy makers argue the regime is not fit for purpose. They point to the European refugee crisis as the latest case in point. Why? What went wrong and where? Can it be fixed? This course will largely focus on the issues of forced migration, displacement and refugees related to conflict, although this subject is inevitably intertwined with larger debates about citizenship and humanitarianism. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, this course will address both scholarly and policy debates. Utilizing human rights scholarship, it will draw on work in history that charts the evolution of institutions; legal scholarship that outlines international and domestic laws; work in political science that seeks to understand responses in a comparative perspective, and anthropological studies that address how refugees understand these institutions and their experiences of exile and belonging. These topics are not only the purview of those in the academy, however. Investigative journalists have most recently provided trenchant coverage of the world’s refugees, especially the current European crisis, where many have reported from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Policy makers scramble to keep up with a crisis literally in motion. We will read their communiqués as well. While we will only begin to skim the surface of these issues, in this course you should expect to gain the following expertise: 1) Knowledge of the modern refugee regime and its origins 2) An analysis of actors and institutions who are tasked with responding to refugee crises and how their roles have changed 3) An understanding of a few critical historical case studies, both in the United States and abroad 4) Critical analysis of the current refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East 5) Knowledge of the asylum process in the US and in comparative perspective 6) An understanding of the debates about conducting research with vulnerable populations such as refugees and displaced persons
This seminar course explores the intersection of human rights and populism, examining how the rise of populist movements, leaders, and ideologies impact democratic institutions, global politics, and the protection of fundamental human rights. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the course evaluates the sociological, economic, and cultural factors driving populist surges, as well as their consequences for civic culture, governance, and international relations. Students will analyze the implications of populism for human rights in the context of migration, authoritarianism, freedom of speech, minorities, and challenges to international and regional courts and institutions. The course will investigate both left-wing and right-wing populist movements, considering the threat they pose to human rights, their pursuit of socio-economic rights through the redistribution of wealth, and how the human rights project could and is being rethought in light of these challenges and opportunities
HRTS GU4270Digital Advocacy for Human Rights: Social Media and Open Source Intelligence3.00
This course examines how digital technologies are transforming human rights advocacy, with primary emphasis on social media campaigning. Students will master hands-on social media platform practices while exploring how open source intelligence (OSINT) methodologies are used to monitor violations and present evidence online through recent case studies. The course prioritizes developing practical social media advocacy and analytic skills, examining how civil society organizations navigate platform policies, content moderation, and political pressures to drive change. Students will analyze how platform policy shifts and content governance changes constrain advocacy strategies, learning to craft campaigns and frame messages for specific audiences. They will analyze cases involving gender, immigration, and trafficking, among others. The OSINT component provides conceptual understanding through contemporary examples including forensic architecture investigations, satellite imagery documentation of mass atrocities, and open source evidence from conflicts like Ukraine. A key component of the course is a research or advocacy project of your choosing. You will develop framing strategies, map relevant networks, and create social media content that demonstrates mastery of digital advocacy techniques. The emergence of these new tools and organizations has produced new ethical dilemmas and reshaped old ones--concerning such fundamental issues as privacy vs. security, the limits of free speech, the trade-off between ethical and pragmatic messaging and fundraising strategies, topics that will be addressed at length in class discussions
This course will address economic and social human rights through the lens of what is happening now in the early 21st century, in light of the enormous shifts that have taken place since the modern human rights movement first emerged in the aftermath of WWII. The course will address many of the central debates about economic and social rights and then examine how those debates apply to specific rights and topics including development, health, housing, work, food and education. Throughout, the course will examine how activists and policymakers have responded to all these changes, and ask what might lie ahead for the human rights movement in addressing economic and social rights in a multilateral, globalized world
HRTS GU4340Human Rights Accountability & Remedies3
Effective remedies for violations of human rights is a core tenet of human rights law. Yet in practice, victims are rarely able to rely on formal accountability mechanisms to deliver remedies. This course examines how advocates combine political, legal and reputational accountability strategies to hold violators accountable where formal enforcement mechanisms are unavailable. The course will look beyond the international criminal legal system, and instead draw on case studies from contexts where the accountability gap is particularly stark: transnational actors who lack direct accountability relationships with rights-holders, including in international development, peacekeeping and corporate activities. By delving into practical and tactical considerations, students will build an understanding of how various strategies work together to build a successful campaign for accountability that results in remedies for victims. Students will engage in simulated exercises in media advocacy, political lobbying, engaging with the UN human rights system, and public campaigning. Students will learn how to build empowering narratives that shape public opinion, center victims in their work, and nurture transnational partnerships to overcome power differentials. Through discussions grounded in both theory and practice, students will also critically interrogate the practice of human rights advocacy.
HRTS GU4360Menstruation, Gender, and Rights: Interdisciplinary Approaches3.00
The course will explore the contemporary discourse around menstruation in global and local contexts. The recent shift in public discourse around menstruation is crucial because efforts to support menstruators across the lifespan not only confer health benefits but are also part of an enduring project of pursuing gender equality and women’s rights. Centering attention on menstrual health resists pernicious social control of women’s bodies and recognizes the body as foundational, urgent and politically relevant. This is why menstruation matters: it unites the personal and the political, the intimate and the public, the physiological and the socio-cultural. The course examines gender justice and women’s rights through the lens of menstruation, discussing questions of gender stereotyping, transnational feminism, and gender identity. Students will gain an understanding of the relevance of menstruation across different spheres of life combining bio-medical and socio-cultural factors. We will ask: What is the relationship between menstruation, human rights and gender equality? What does it mean to approach menstrual health research from an interdisciplinary perspective? -- Over the course of the semester, we will examine different spheres of life, including health, education, equality in the work place, freedom of religion, and cultural rights. In doing so, the course will pay particular attention to the intersection of gender and other markers of inequalities, including disability, socio-economic status, age, caste, and gender identity. The course development is supported by the Provost's Interdisciplinary Teaching Award
This course will examine practical issues, opportunities, tactics and strategies to advocate for economic and social rights. The course will incorporate central debates about economic and social rights, such as how to identify violators and define state responsibility, whether these rights can be litigated, and how to make implementable recommendations for change, measure implementation and measure impact. The course will also look more in depth at the standards and fulfillment challenges on several of the key rights including health, housing, education, and labor. Throughout the course, you will focus on one economic and social rights topic of your choice. Through the lens of your chosen topic, you will review how organizations and social movements have engaged to affect change on similar issues, and use that research to explore many of the practical skills of advocacy and campaigning: framing recommendations and calls to action; drafting policy briefs; crafting media pitches and social media content; and designing and evaluating an overall advocacy strategy
Debates over the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have never been more visible in the international arena. Advocates are beginning to have some success in putting sexual orientation and gender identity on the agenda for inclusion in human rights instruments. But in many local and regional contexts, state-sanctioned homophobia is on the rise, from the official anti-gay stance of Russia featured during the Sochi Winter Games to the passage of Mississippi’s anti-gay bill and Uganda’s anti-homosexuality act. This course examines these trends in relation to strategies pursued by grassroots activists and NGOs and the legal issues they raise, including marriage and family rights, discrimination, violence, torture, sex classification, and asylum. We will also focus on current debates about the relation between sexual rights and gender justice, tensions between universalisty constructions of gay/trans identity and local formations of sexual and gender non-conformity, and legacies of colonialism
The unfolding climate emergency occurs at the confluence of three global systems of domination – capitalism, racialized imperialism, and patriarchy. Premised as they are on exploitation, competition, and inequality rather than consideration, cooperation and balance, these systems of domination not only have caused the crisis but are seemingly unable to resolve it. Among the injustices of the contemporary impasse is the likelihood the people who have least benefited from the global (dis)order, and especially minorities in the global south, will be the worst affected casualties of climate change. Encompassing a focus on equity and frameworks for accountability and redress, the human rights paradigm is a useful lens through which to analyze the emergency, exert accountability, and imagine better futures. It is against this backdrop that this interdisciplinary (climate science, law, politics, social science, development studies and anthropology) course on Climate Justice has been introduced to the Human Rights Studies MA program. This 3-credit course addresses contemporary issues in the evolving discourse and epistemology of climate justice. How should we understand the climate emergency from a social justice perspective? What terminologies, discourses and paradigms are useful? How have individuals, non-government organizations and social movements sought to overcome climate change vulnerabilities and advance climate justice? What litigation, law and policy initiatives have been brought, and with what level of success? And what alternative models of living, working and being are conceivable for a more socially, ecologically, and existentially sustainable world?
The course addresses selected issues in the protection of socio-economic rights in an international and comparative perspective. Socio-economic rights have emerged from the margins into the mainstream of human rights. The course will take this status as its starting point and examine the human rights to housing, food, water, health and sanitation in depth. We will explore conceptual issues through the lens of specific rights which will help us ground these principles and ideas in concrete cases. We will discuss developments on socioeconomic rights and examine their relevance in the United States as well as selected other countries, particularly those with progressive legislation, policies and jurisprudence. What is the meaning and scope of the rights to housing, food, water, health and sanitation? What is the impact of discrimination and inequalities on the enjoyment of socio-economic rights? How can governments be held accountable for the realization of human rights? What machinery is there at the international level to ensure that the rights are protected, respected and fulfilled? How can this machinery be enhanced? How can judicial, quasijudicial, administrative and political mechanisms be used at the domestic level? What is the role of different actors in the context of human rights, the role of States and individuals, but also (powerful) non-State actors and civil society? How have activists and policymakers responded to challenges? And what lies ahead for the human rights movement in addressing economic and social rights in a multilateral, globalized world?
In August 2016, a working group of the International Geological Congress voted to acknowledge a new geological epoch, following 11,700 years of the Holocene, and that it would be called The Anthropocene. The announcement indicated a new era in the earth’s chronology marked by the consequences of human activity on the planet’s ecosystems. Closely related to discussions of sustainability, investigations into the Anthropocene tend to focus on environmental and ecological issues while ignoring its social justice dimensions. This course will investigate how Human Rights has and will be impacted by the Anthropocene, with special attention paid to the human dimensions and consequences of anthropogenic change. Do new and troubling revelations about anthropogenic mistreatment of the earth and its resources modify or amplify the kinds of responsibilities that govern activity between individuals and communities? How do we scale the human response from the urban, to the periurban, to the rural? How must the study of Human Rights evolve to address violence and mistreatment associated not just among humans but also amid human habitats? What sorts of juridical changes must occur to recognize and respond to new manifestations of social injustice that relate directly to consequences of anthropogenic changes to the Earth system? Topics will include discussions of the Environmental Justice movement, agribusiness, access to (and allocation of) natural resources, population growth; its global impact, advocacy for stronger and more accountability through environmental legal change, biodiversity in urban environments, and the growing category of environmental refugees
This course is designed to introduce contemporary children’s rights issues and help students develop practical advocacy skills to protect and promote the rights of children. Students will explore case studies of advocacy campaigns addressing issues including juvenile justice, child labor, child marriage, the use of child soldiers, corporal punishment, migration and child refugees, female genital mutilation, and LBGT issues affecting children. Over the course of the semester, students will become familiar with international children’s rights standards, as well as a variety of advocacy strategies and avenues, including use of the media, litigation, and advocacy with UN, legislative bodies, and the private sector. Written assignments will focus on practical advocacy tools, including advocacy letters, op-eds, submissions to UN mechanisms or treaty bodies, and the development of an overarching advocacy strategy, including the identification of goals and objectives, and appropriate advocacy targets and tactics
HRTS GU4700Ethical Dilemmas in Healthcare: A Human Rights Approach3
This course examines major ethical dilemmas that emerge in the convergence between human rights and public health at the national and international levels. Using specific case studies, Attention will be given to the rationales, meaning and implementation of the right to health across borders; the theories and practices of allocation of scare resources; the challenges of providing care for minority groups—including sexual minorities, children, and persons with disabilities; and the ethical, legal, and social implications of international health governance. This is an interactive course, with interdisciplinary scholarship and exploration of issues in historical, cultural and political contexts.
The resurgence of religion over the past three decades has had a transformative influence globally and within nations. Religious nationalism, fundamentalism, and communalism have arisen to forcefully compete with secular democracy. With the fall of the Soviet bloc and the bilateralism of the Cold War, ethnic particularism, often of a religious character, has emerged as the locus of identity for people on all continents. These rapid changes engendered by a new, often commanding, role for religion challenge the very concept of individual and universal human rights. They raise difficult theoretical and painfully practical questions as to the preservation of individual human rights, and the relationship of democracy to religion. At the same time, recent currents such as economic globalization, the triumph of the free market, and the communications revolution promote individual autonomy, a cornerstone of human rights. There can be no doubt that religion will occupy an increasingly salient role in the social and political life of nations during the course of the 21st century. The relevance of religion to human rights in our time cannot be undervalued. The course examines the relationship of religion to human rights from several standpoints, including religions role in abetting intolerance, religious minorities as victims of human rights violations, and religion as a framer of human rights ideals which inspire action
Rising authoritarianism, climate catastrophe, grinding wars, mass involuntary migration, rampant misinformation and the unsettling possibilities of AI have made the world promised by the human rights project seem a distant or even fanciful prospect. Whatever faith we have in human rights to either secure or remake the world has had good reason to be shaken—or was unfounded from the start. Indeed, since universal rights were proposed there have been skeptics, questioning their abstraction, insufficiency, Eurocentrism, and overreach, among other shortcomings. When it comes to critiquing human rights, is there anything left to be said? This seminar course considers where the human rights idea and project goes from here. Starting rather than ending with these critiques, we will pursue theoretical and practical attempts to reimagine human rights in their light. How have commentators drawn on liberal, pragmatic, radical democratic, and anticolonial thought to forge a vision of human rights made to the measure of a world in crisis? What are the value and limits of critique in the human rights project? And how do theory and praxis relate in attempts to reconstruct human rights beyond these critiques? In pursuit of answers, we will read political theory, history, philosophy, and ethnography, as well as together assemble an archive of already existing projects to reformulate, resignify, and mobilize human rights in novel directions
The United States has a long complex relationship with the international human rights system. Although its founding was grounded in fundamental norms of inalienable rights, equality and freedom, U.S. history is characterized by divisive and sometimes violent disagreements about who counts as human, what is fundamental to the human condition, and which/how rights should be protected. How has this history contributed to our contemporary struggles? Through engaging with issues related to racial justice, criminal justice, reproductive justice, disability justice, gender justice, and indigenous people’s rights, students are asked to consider how certain rights are sites of contestation within the U.S. political system and within U.S. society. This course offers a multidisciplinary survey of urgent contemporary human rights issues in the United States and seeks to advance students’ skills to examine human rights research and analysis through intersectional approaches. Part of the inquiry of this course is ensuring that students understand existing tensions among several key concepts (1) human rights as a body of international human rights law and institutions; (2) human rights movements using human rights discourse to further their aspirations; (3) constitutional rights in the U.S. as interpreted by U.S. courts that may or may not allude to/be contained in international law; and (4) political rhetoric that use the language of “rights” for political ends. Coursework will ground current human rights debates in their social, legal, and political contexts. It will outline the different actors in the human rights landscape, focusing on mobilization strategies of human rights movements and the policy reforms that they seek to advance human rights agendas. Students will engage with legal cases and legislation in the United States. By the end of this course, you should expect to be able to: Understand critical human rights issues in the United States, and apply international and domestic human rights principles and practice to these contemporary human rights debates; Understand the role of social movements in shaping narratives around human rights; Analyze (through case studies) the real-life application and effects of human rights policies, as well as how they contribute to the promotion, progressive enforcement, and internalization of international human rights
HRTS GU4900UN HUMAN RIGHTS BODIES:IMPACT-REFORM-ADV4.00
The course is part of the programs offerings in experiential learning. Students will engage in an applied research project with an NGO partner focused on the role of UN Special Rapporteurs and the strategies they employ. Students will become familiar with the intricacies of the UN human rights system, while also taking a birds-eye view on the system, its challenges and the need for reform, The course seeks to combine critical reflection with practical application, including through the perspectives of practitioners and guest speakers who discuss their strategies for advocacy
HRTS GU4910Children's Rights, Armed Conflict, and Peacebuilding3
According the UN Secretary-General’s (SG) annual report on children and armed conflict last year armed conflicts around the world led to at least 4,000 verified rights violations against children committed by government forces and over 11,500 by non-state armed groups. The violations include killing or maiming, recruitment or use of children in hostilities, sexual violence, using children as human bombs, abductions, the denial of humanitarian access, and attacks on schools and hospitals. About 50 per cent of the estimated 26 million people currently displaced by armed conflicts and violence are children. This course examines global approaches, challenges and problems associated with providing resources, implementing laws and guidelines, and ensuring education to children before, during and after armed conflicts. Students will be asked to interrogate current approaches and literature in light of critical theories of childhood, human rights and children’s rights more specifically. The course utilizes case studies that show the failures of international human rights and NGOs to address the needs of children before, during, and after conflict, as well as the problems with not taking into account children’s perspectives and lived experience. The course seeks to the extent possible to incorporate children’s views on conflict through a review of children’s drawings, writing, and interviews. It questions the common representations about children and armed conflict that mass media, international development literature, children’s literature, and film promote. The course will also explore the international norms for protecting children in emergencies which have also been strengthened considerably, by a number of UN Security Council resolutions, notably resolutions 1612 and 1820, aimed at ending the abuse of children and civilians in the context of war. What are the responsibilities of the International Community to protect and support children of war? What preventative measures can be taken to better ensure children do not fall victims to armed conflict? Finally, the course takes a special look at education prior to, during conflict, and post-conflict, to understand how and whether the root causes of conflict-- discrimination, intolerance, economic inequality-- are addressed by educational systems.
The course will explore the often-contested terrain of urban contexts, looking at cities fron architectural, sociological, historical, and political positions. What do rights have to do with the city? Can the ancient idea of a right to the city tell us something fundamental about both rights and cities? Our notion of citizenship is based in the understanding of a city as a community, and yet today why do millions of people live in cities without citizenship? The course will be organized thematically in order to discuss such issues as the consequences of cities developments in relation to their peripheries beginning with the normative idea of urban boundaries deriving from fortifying walls, debates around the public sphere, nomadic architecture and urbanism, informal settlements such as slums and shantytowns, surveillance and control in urban centers, refugees and the places they live, catastrophes natural and man-made and reconstruction, and sovereign areas within cities the United Nations, War Crimes Tribunals. At the heart of our inquiry will be an investigation of the ways in which rights within urban contexts are either granted or withheld
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. Please e-mail the instructor at bc14@columbia.edu. This seminar will cover various issues, debates, and concepts in the international law of armed conflict (known as international humanitarian law), particularly as it relates to the protection of non-combatants (civilians and prisoners of war). In doing so, we will examine how international humanitarian law and human rights law intersect. Both sets of legal norms are designed to protect the lives, well-being, and dignity of individuals.However, the condition of armed conflict provides a much wider set of options for governments and individuals to engage in violent, deadly action against others, including killing, forcibly detaining, and destroying the property of those designated as combatants. At the same time, the means of waging war are not unlimited, but rather are tightly regulated by both treaty and customary law. This course will examine how these regulations operate in theory and practice, focusing on the principles of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity
In this course, we will consider human rights as an educational enterprise, and education as a human rights practice. In addition to codifying the human right to education in Article 26, the Universal Declaration gives priority to “teaching and education” as a primary mechanism for ensuring respect, recognition, and observance of human rights. While human rights are more typically understood through legal and political discourse, this course focuses on education as both the site of and a strategy in struggles for just, equitable, and dignified communities. This course examines both the right to education and the emergent field of human rights education, and provides students the opportunity to analyze human rights as a form of public pedagogy aimed at fostering particular kinds of subjects and communities. Using historical and contemporary examples, the course explores various educational strategies designed to promote human rights in different contexts and among different learners, and evaluates educational institutions as potential sites of human rights promotion and violation
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. Please e-mail the instructor at bc14@columbia.edu. Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Please e-mail the instructor at bc14@columbia.edu. This course will examine the tension between two contradictory trends in world politics. On the one hand, we have emerged from a century that has seen some of the most brutal practices ever perpetrated by states against their populations in the form of genocide, systematic torture, mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Many of these abuses occurred after the Holocaust, even though the mantra never again was viewed by many as a pledge never to allow a repeat of these practices. Events in the new century suggest that these trends will not end anytime soon. At the same time, since the middle of the twentieth century, for the first time in human history there has been a growing global consensus that all individuals are entitled to at least some level of protection from abuse by their governments. This concept of human rights has been institutionalized through international law, diplomacy, international discourse, transnational activism, and the foreign policies of many states. Over the past two decades, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and international tribunals have gone further than any institutions in human history to try to stem state abuses. This seminar will try to make sense of these contradictions
HRTS GU4955Narrative and Representation in Post-Conflict Societites3
This course explores the relationship between narrative and the legacy of violence and atrocity in post-conflict societies, focusing particularly on the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia (and more briefly Indonesia and Armenia). Examining a range of medium – including, but not limited, to eye-witness accounts, memoirs, history books, government reports, film, theater, memorials - we will consider how different narratives address issues of history and memory, justice and judgment. We will also discuss how narrative influences efforts to achieve reconciliation and come to terms with the past on both personal and societal levels. Does revisiting the past allow people who either suffered or inflicted terrible violence – or both – once again live together? Are there particular modes or genres of narrative that are particularly successful in terms of enabling societies to reflect on their past and respond adequately? Can justice and accountability ever be achieved?These are some of the questions we will consider as we examine the ways in which atrocities are written about, remembered, judged and interpreted.
HRTS GU4965Gender-Based Violence ＆ Human Rights3.00
The term 'gendercide' highlights a range of distinct and specific forms of violence executed against human beings based on their own gender self-identification as well as patriarchal assumptions about their gender. In this course, we will examine research discerning, movements challenging, and the adjudication, and/or lack thereof, of Gender Based Violence (GBV) in several major categories traversing spatial, temporal, and ideological contexts, including: reproductive rights and health; trafficking and migration; and disaster and pandemics. It is critical to: interrogate the ideologies that drive and sustain GBV; examine in detail the harm it presents to human beings; explore what can be done to protect the security of those experiencing GBV; and to think about measures of prevention to guard additional human beings from experiencing it. The heart of the course will involve an intersectional analysis of specific case studies; highlighting the GBV associated with each case; examining the impact of GBV on human rights; and how GBV has been addressed in society. The close study of each case will assist students in illuminating intricacies, complexities, and challenges to human security in specific contexts
This interdisciplinary course grapples with nation-states and cities at its margins, exploring the exclusions, oppositions, silences and, in particular, the 'Others' or 'in-betweens' of the nation-state as an organizing tool. ‘Illegal migrants’, ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘exiles’, ‘nomads’, ‘aliens’, and other ‘Others’: these are all in-between figures, exceptions to a political order defined by membership in the city, borders, sovereignty and nation-states. In their very existence, they represent a challenge to this political order, as social and political theorists have long recognized. This seminar explores the dynamics, contradictions and politics surrounding nation-states and their Others with particular attention to the responses to them on the part of ostensibly liberal-democratic states. We examine the relationship between citizenship, statelessness, refugee-hood and migration as exceptions to a political order defined by membership in the city, borders, sovereignty and nation-states. Students will engage with film, fiction, visual animations and displacement maps to examine key theoretical and critical interventions by scholars who examine nation-states and cities at their margins. To this end, participants will examine key theoretical interventions by Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben alongside scholars who have grappled with, contested, and developed their ideas, such as Étienne Balibar, Didier Bigo, Jacques Rancière, and Seyla Benhabib. With these texts, the participants will attempt to explore non-national or post-national alternatives to the nation-state and citizenship as a tool for planning and organization of people and space. Taken together, this course provides an alternative to conventional scholarship on this subject. It engages with and provides an alternative to the mainstream literature to take for granted the inclusive and integrative character of nation-states and its respective memberships in the form of refugees, citizens and migrants. At first glance, the course may appear highly theoretical, but not to worry—we will move slowly through the texts and concepts together. The instructor will also ensure that we apply the ideas discussed in class to concrete and tangible case studies with examples given to enable easier access and collective learning
This interdisciplinary course grapples with the relationship between borders, surveillance, power and rights, critically examining the ways in which lines, boundaries, and caesuras are drawn among geographical entities, communities, identities, environments, and ultimately, social relations – demarcating self and other, establishing hierarchical relationships and activating infrastructures of violence. This seminar explores the dynamics, contradictions and politics surrounding borders and surveillance, and borrows from the fields of film, architecture, art and urban studies to explore the effect on access to and formulations of human rights. To this end, we engage notions of biopolitics, racialization, exclusion/exception, necropolitics, coloniality, hospitality and securitization, among others. The course also engages visual and spatial methodologies and maps out everyday practices of resistance that seek to challenge, subvert or collapse the multifaceted violence of borders. Taken together, this course provides an alternative to conventional scholarship on this subject. It engages with and provides an alternative to the mainstream literature to take for granted the inclusive and integrative character of nation-states. At first glance, the course may appear highly theoretical, but not to worry—we will move slowly through the texts and concepts together. The instructor will also ensure that we apply the ideas discussed in class to concrete and tangible case studies with examples given to enable easier access and collective learning
Across the world, conflict and violence are on the rise, in many forms and due to myriad factors. This course explores the relationship between war, conflict, and education. Drawing on a human rights framework and its applications to education, this course will explore the possibilities and limitations inherent in this framework. Questions we will explore include: How does education contribute to, or mitigate conflict? What is the role of education in emergencies? What is the role of education in addressing the needs of refugees? What is the role of education in post conflict contexts and peacebuilding? What is human rights education?
