Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘social space’, this paper attempts to lay bare how human rights NGOs attain the power needed to bring about social change. The paper argues that the strategies NGOs employ cannot explain their social and political impact for the basic reason that many NGOs use the same strategies and yet there is a large power differential among them.
Building on the literature that analyzes the impact of norms and ideas on international and domestic politics, it is our assumption that the widespread introduction and dissemination of a human rights discourse enables oppressed groups to translate events into rights language and to appeal to courts, politicians and media in order to seek remedies for their grievances.
Letting Be: Fred Dallmayr's Cosmopolitical Vision, University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
11 years 1 month ago
It was still unclear whether the student had cheated. Following the professor’s complaint, I had asked the department secretary to invite her to come to my offi ce, and she was now waiting outside my door. I was a bit tense as usual when sorting out such uncomfortable matters.
If one were to compare two human rights organizations, Physicians for Human Rights USA (PHR USA) and its Israeli counterpart, one would expect to find that
their activities were similar. Surely the different geographical and political context within which each organization operates influences theirwork, but because both are
doctors’ rights groups and because both use international human rights conventions as their point of reference, their mode and sphere of action should presumably be
the same.
One of the effects of the second Palestinian Intifada, which erupted in September 2000, has been the dramatic rise in popular support for Hamas. In January 2000, public opinion polls suggested that 10 percent of Palestinians backed Hamas. Five years later, Hamas won three times more seats than the ruling Fatah Party in the Gaza Strip’s municipal elections, making it the number one party in the region.
Focusing on the representation of Israel’s policy of extra-judicial executions, which is a blatant violation of human rights, this article discloses how Israel’s three major newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth, Ma’ariv, and Ha’aretz have helped produce, disseminate and reinforce both the rationality and the morality of executions. The article employs the insights of theorists like Michel Foucault and Hayden White to argue that the rationalisation of the execution policy is achieved through what may be described as the discursive production of a pseudo-judicial process.
In 1946, the Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council) declared a general strike to protest the Mandatory restrictions denying access to Nazi victims who sought refuge in Palestine. Philosophy professor Leon Roth decided not to comply with the Vaad’s call, thus infuriating the striking students who began banging on his class door in order to interrupt his lecture.
The title of this essay comes from Hannah Arendt’s book Men in Dark Times, a collection of essays describing the activities of men and women who provided a glimmer of light and hope during sinister periods. “Israeli Peace Camp in Dark Times” invokes the meaning Arendt ascribed to her title but also adds another dimension.
This paper examines the translation of classic political philosophy into Hebrew, arguing that a variety of ideological positions can be disclosed simply by examining the erasure process employed during translation. Exploring the connection between translation and nation-building, I claim that segments from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, John Locke’s Two Treaties of Government and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan were excised in the service of a Zionist identity politics.
