Ethno Cultural Diversity And Human Rights

What is the role of ethno-cultural groups in human rights discourse? Under international human rights law, standards are unclear and ambivalent, while traditional analyses have often failed to elucidate and unpack the conceptual, legal, and policy complexities involved. In Ethno-Cultural Diversity and Human Rights, prominent experts chart new territory by addressing contested dimensions of the field. They include the impact of collective interests on rights discourse and nation-building, international law’s responses to group demands for decision-making authority, and concerns for immigration, intersectionality, and peacebuilding. Drawing from diverse scholarship in international law, legal and moral philosophy, and political science, this volume will be essential reading for scholars and practitioners of human rights, diversity, and conflict management.

Despite decades of nation-building exercise, ethnic-based claims for substantive equality, justice and equitable political inclusion and socio-economic order continue to result in communal rivalries. These are claims that define and represent the issue of minorities in Africa, of which these conflicts are manifestations. Although ethnic conflicts in Africa have been a subject of a large number of studies, the potential and role of norms on minority rights to address claims that ethno-cultural groups raise has not received the attention it deserves. Based on materials from normative political theory and international human rights law and using an empirical and prescriptive analysis, this book defends a robust system of minority rights built around culture, equality and self-determination. This is employed to elaborate an adequate constitutional design providing policy frameworks (multilingual language policy, recognition and affirmation of cultural diversity,), structures (that ensure just representation and participation of members of all groups) and norms (that guarantee substantive equality and the rights to language, religion and culture). The study then proffers two cases studies (South Africa and Ethiopia) to ascertain how such constitutional design might be translated into actual policy frameworks, institutions and norms.

By unanimous adoption of the Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity, the UNESCO Member States accepted a new ethical approach to respect diversity as a guiding principle for democratic societies. While support for the Declaration remains strong, there is a general awareness that the democratic management of multicultural societies needs rethinking and further development. This publication examines the political governance of cultural diversity, specifically how public policy-making has dealt with the claims for cultural recognition that have increasingly been expressed by ethno-national movements, language groups, religious minorities, indigenous peoples and migrant communities. Its principle aim is to understand, explain and assess public policy responses to ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. Adopting interdisciplinary perspectives of comparative social sciences, the contributors address the conditions, forms, and consequences of democratic and human-rights-based governance of multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-faith societies.--Publisher's description.

Cultural diversity, as expressed for instance in different normative orders or legal cultures, poses both a practical and a theoretical challenge to the idea of universal human rights. In the present volume, the authors seek to address and contain this challenge with a view to the changing nature of the global society. While 'culture' is sometimes signposted as an obstacle to human rights on the ground, this volume suggests that in so far as the global 'culture of human rights' is primarily seen as a formal and institutional order based on a particular view of equal human worth, local cultures cannot trump it. The main point is that the culture of human rights is inclusive of all and must maintain a standard by which all peoples and cultures can measure their own performances. Further, and as demonstrated in the present volume from a range of disciplines such as law, literature, history and anthropology, culture is not a mental prison but a particular outlook upon the world, for ever changing in response to new experiences and insights.

This book provides rich and detailed accounts of how the media filters racial/ethnic identity through economic or sensationalized perspectives in newspapers, films, television, and radio. By exploring media descriptions of various racial/ethnic groups, Cultural Diversity and the U.S. Media provides opportunities to discover, debate, and discuss issues surrounding race/ethnicity and the role of the media in American society.

This book is not an impersonal academic treatise on social justice activism but instead the author's description of what social justice activism has looked like through the prism of his eyes. The methods of the book are straightforward, using historical, current and personal data--all of which were inextricably entwined. The text focuses on the truth that bigotry is perpetuated by countless white, black and brown people. More important than academic debates about bigotry, the book is about negating or preventing bigotry. The author reviews historical incidents and also tells portions of his own life stories. His goal is to help readers know his perceptions of bigotry and then compare and contrast his perceptions with their own. The text is organized in major topics: Beginnings of Bigotry; Creation of a Nation; Migrants, Immigrants and Slaves; Quest for Civil Rights; Women's Rights Movement; Disability Rights Movement; Elder Rights Movement; LGBTQ Rights Movement; Social Class Matters; and Going Forward. This book is written to be actively read and to initiate meaningful conversations about social justice. The primary audiences for the text are college students who are majoring in social and behavioral sciences, social work and health care. The book will also be a valuable resource to teachers, community activists, and other persons who want to enhance their knowledge of racism, sexism, homonegativity, ableism, ageism, xenophobia and classism.

The democratic management of cultural diversity is the greatest political challenge for present-day European societies. The plural character of our societies forces us to rethink the basic political concepts, starting off from a new idea of inclusive and plural d¬emocracy. The application of human rights must be reconsidered in the light of presentday reality so that democratic states are able to guarantee the benefi t of these rights to all persons through their identity and not in spite of it, thus creating political spaces that are open to a multi-identity coexistence.

Drawing from a comprehensive review of legal instruments, practice, jurisprudence and literature, and using a multidisciplinary approach, this unique book brings forth the full spectrum of cultural rights, as individual and collective human rights, and offers a compelling vision for public policy.

A critical analysis of how international law operates in the ideology of the postcolonial state to marginalise minority groups.

Liberal theories have long insisted that cultural diversity in democratic societies can be accommodated through classical liberal tools, in particular through individual rights, and they have often rejected the claims of cultural minorities for group rights as illiberal. Group Rights as Human Rights argues that such a rejection is misguided. Based on a thorough analysis of the concept of group rights, it proposes to overcome the dominant dichotomy between "individual" human rights and "collective" group rights by recognizing that group rights also serve individual interests. It also challenges the claim that group rights, so understood, conflict with the liberal principle of neutrality; on the contrary, these rights help realize the neutrality ideal as they counter cultural biases that exist in Western states. Group rights deserve to be classified as human rights because they respond to fundamental, and morally important, human interests. Reading the theories of Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor as complementary rather than opposed, Group Rights as Human Rights sees group rights as anchored both in the value of cultural belonging for the development of individual autonomy and in each person’s need for a recognition of her identity. This double foundation has important consequences for the scope of group rights: it highlights their potential not only in dealing with national minorities but also with immigrant groups; and it allows to determine how far such rights should also benefit illiberal groups. Participation, not intervention, should here be the guiding principle if group rights are to realize the liberal promise.