Posts Tagged ‘human rights’
May 8th, 2012
posted by
Benjamin Schonthal
As several contributors to this forum have pointed out, legal provisions regarding religious freedom do not emerge from history fully formed and self-interpreting. At their core, they are iterations of words and texts, (re)produced and (re)authorized by different persons or groups for different purposes. What they mean depends on local facts.
This contribution expands upon this observation by offering a different story about drafting religious rights in a particular place and time. I will show the ways in which religious rights, as rhetoric, serve not as apolitical instruments, but as indicia of political alliances; not as generic, universalizable norms, but as specific formulations of norms suited to particular moments and in service of particular political programs. In this version of the story, religious rights, rather than conclude conflict and harmonize societies, signpost disagreement.
Tags: British Empire, Ceylon, colonialism, constitutional law, decolonization, human rights, international affairs, Ireland, law and religion, religious freedom, resistance, Sri Lanka, United Nations
Posted in The politics of religious freedom | No Comments »
March 1st, 2012
posted by
Wei Zhu
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recently released a new guide, Partnering with Religious Communities for Children, intended to support UNICEF staff and other child rights organizations build effective partnerships with religious communities, in particular religious leaders, networks, and local faith communities.
Tags: development, faith-based organizations, human rights, international affairs, UNICEF
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
March 1st, 2012
posted by
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Like a good movie, the story of international religious freedom offers something for everyone. It pits cowardly oppressors against heroic saviors. It is a story of the triumph of international law over those who fail to adhere to global norms and standards. It is a story of secular tolerance versus violent religion. And today especially, it is a story of the need for the U.S. government and its friends to “convince” others—particularly Muslims—that they should endorse a particular model of religious liberty as a template for organizing and democratizing their politics and societies.
Tags: Arab Spring, belief, Christianity, definition of religion, Donald Lopez, human rights, international affairs, international law, Malcolm Evans, Middle East, public policy, religious freedom, religious persecution, Talal Asad
Posted in The politics of religious freedom | 5 Comments »
February 23rd, 2012
posted by
Taline Cox
Lila Abu-Lughod and Anumpama Rao—editors of Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent, a special issue of SocialDifference-Online—sat down for a conversation with the editors of Jadaliyya.
Tags: family law, gender, human rights, international, Islam, journals, law and religion, marriage, sharia, women's rights
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
November 2nd, 2011
posted by
Stephen Hopgood
On October 21, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Europe, India, and the United States met for a workshop, “Shared Sovereignty: Rights, Religion and the Problem of Authority,” organized by Leslie Vinjamuri, Matt Nelson, Stephen Hopgood, and Rochana Bajpai.
Tags: authority, human rights, international affairs, international relations, secularism, sovereignty
Posted in events | No Comments »
October 3rd, 2011
posted by
Annie Hardison-Moody
The global feminist blog Gender Across Borders, in partnership with Violence is Not Our Culture: the Global Campaign to End Violence Against Women in the Name of ‘Culture,’ is seeking writers for an upcoming series on gender-based violence, culture, and women’s rights. The series will run on October 27th and 28th, and will feature personal narratives, profiles, book reviews, journalistic articles, analytical pieces, critical essays, and editorials.
Tags: call for submissions, human rights, women's rights
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
August 17th, 2011
posted by
Nathan Schneider
Saba Mahmood is an anthropologist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and whose work raises challenging questions about the relationship between religion and secularism, ethics and politics, agency and freedom. Her book Politics of Piety, a study of a grassroots women’s piety movement in Cairo, questions the analytical and political claims of feminism as well as the secular liberal assumptions on the basis of which such movements are often judged. In the volume Is Critique Secular? she joins Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown in rethinking the Danish cartoon controversy as a conflict between blasphemy and free speech, between secular and religious world views. Now, Mahmood is working on a comparative project about the right to religious liberty and minority-majority relations in the Middle East. We spoke over breakfast in New York City.
Tags: anthropology, Arab Spring, Cairo, Danish cartoon affair, Deathless questions, Egypt, feminism, gender, human rights, international affairs, international law, Islam, religious freedom
Posted in Interviews | No Comments »
July 19th, 2011
posted by
Grace Yukich
A post at the New York Times philosophy blog “The Stone” reflects on the differences between religious and secular underpinnings of human rights. The author, Anat Biletzki, critiques the argument that human rights are impossible without religion, or, particularly, belief in God. Instead, she asserts that the secular basis for human rights is in fact more faithful to humanity than religious justifications, which she defines as rooted in the authority of a superhuman creator (i.e., God) rather than in the value of the human.
Tags: belief, human rights, philosophy
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
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