Activating Human Rights and Peace

Theories, Practices and Contexts

GOH Bee Chen, Baden Offord, GOH Bee Chen, Baden Offord, Rob Garbutt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409430766
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317185673
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Human rights and peace issues and concerns have come about at a critical time. The world has recently witnessed a plethora of turning points that speak of the hopes and vulnerabilities which are inherent in being human and demonstrate that change in the service of human rights and peace is possible. At the same time, however, other events indicate that wherever there is life, there is vulnerability in a world characterized by instability and endemic human suffering. On top of all this, the collapse of the global financial system and the serious, rapid destruction of the environment have brought the world to a precarious state of vulnerability. Activating human rights and peace is, therefore, a project that is always in progress, and is never finally achieved. This enlightening collection of well thought through cases is aimed at academics and students of human rights, political science, law and justice, peace and conflict studies and sociology.

Chapter 1
Activating Human Rights and Peace: An Overview of Theory, Practice and Context

GOH Bee Chen, Baden Offord and Rob Garbutt

Contemporary Development of Human Rights and Peace Issues

Human Rights and Peace issues are timeless and intertwined. To be a human being is to know and understand that each one of us needs minimum rights for peaceful co-existence. In an ideal world, one would have hoped that these rights might be guaranteed and enshrined in legal instruments capable of being enforced in times of breach. Yet, sadly, daily we see violations of human rights in instances of threats to basic human dignity, or worse still, in pockets of violence across the globe. Wherever peace is threatened, human rights are at stake.

This edited collection on human rights and peace issues and concerns has come about at a critical time. The world has recently witnessed a plethora of turning points such as the Arab Spring that speak of the hopes and vulnerabilities, which are inherent in being human, and a demonstration that a change in the service of human rights and peace is possible. Of significance, too, in 2008, was the world-wide acclamation of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And, in 2008 in Australia, we witnessed the much-heralded national apology tendered to its Indigenous Peoples by the then relatively new Rudd Government. These events are a reminder that ideas about what is possible for human rights and peace are important, and become beacons of hope when put into practice, when they are activated. Activating human rights and peace is a twinned possibility.

Activating Human Rights and Peace then becomes a phrase in movement, not just a lip-service phrase. At the same time, however, other events remind us that wherever there is life, there is vulnerability. Traumatic natural disasters in early 2011 such as the major floods in substantial parts of Queensland in Australia, major earthquakes in Christchurch in New Zealand, devastating earthquakes and a tsunami in north-eastern Japan, extensive starvation in the north of Africa, violent oppression in Zimbabwe, Sudan and the Congo, ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and terrorism in India and Pakistan, are examples of a world characterized by instability, hardship, and endemic human suffering. On top of all this, the collapse of the global financial system and the serious, rapid destruction of the environment have brought the world to a precarious state of vulnerability. The idea of Human Rights, then, provides a constant reminder to us as human beings of the essentiality of an upliftment of the human condition, wherever and whenever it behoves us so to discharge this fundamental duty. Activating human rights and peace is, therefore, a project that is always in progress, and is never finally achieved. The critical thing is that we keep our hopes high, and our dreams possible.

The idea of ‘activating human rights’ originated with and was inspired by a conversation one of the editors, Baden Offord, had with Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu several years ago. Archbishop Tutu suggested the best way to engage human rights is to tackle their meaning and purpose through gatherings1 that bring together scholar, activist and community member to exchange experience and thought on matters of being human. This enquiry into how human rights can be activated, that is, brought into both vision and practice as a living praxis, is integral to living in peace. Here peace is conceived of as not only an absence of conflict and oppression, but as an ongoing creative and ethical activity of learning to live with each other, and with the Earth on which our lives depend. Situated experience could then be linked substantively to education, activism, vision and theory. This book is an attempt to explore these themes in three sections: Theories, Practices and Contexts.

Furthermore, these themes were made into a legacy by an eminent jurist, ardent human rights advocate and a former Australian High Court Justice the Honourable Michael Kirby, Patron of the Centre for Peace and Social Justice at Southern Cross University.2 He has offered insights regarding the important relationship of human rights to a peaceful world, that recognition of people’s inherent dignity and humanity was germane to building peace. These ideas, according to him, could not be left idle without vision and application; they require sustained input and energy, ongoing commitment and careful deliberations.

Kirby observed that human rights issues are practical matters which impact on all of us every day, whether we are conscious of them or not. He spoke of his own experience as a gay Australian and how issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and human rights also sustain peaceful relations and communities. What Kirby did through reflecting on his own life was to bring home the fact that human rights and peace provide a language for dialogue about human life in all of its diversity and complexity. He implored everyone to make this language deeply coherent and practical, and to clarify and extend the framework of human rights into broader discussions about what constitutes and sustains peace. He asked us to think about what needs to be done within and beyond our own lives, and what needs to be done for the future. He asked us to go beyond the predictable. In this connection, we are indeed grateful to encapsulate Kirby’s wisdom, expertise and experience by way of his own chapter contribution in this book recounting his time as Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for Human Rights in Cambodia.

This book hopes to capture the extraordinarily unpredictable range of experience and the multiple approaches to human rights and peace thinking and practice. Importantly, human vulnerability is recast as a characteristic of all human life, not as a specific weakness or deficit, but as something substantively related to power in all its forms. There is a recognition that no one is above being vulnerable.

Thus, human rights and peace become portals of learning about being human, about how to respond to the urgent problems the world presently faces. Kirby’s call to activate human rights was salient for its strong focus on the sustained meaning and purpose of co-existence, not to rest on easy formulas nor become trapped by ideological, religious, or cultural cul de sacs that may lead us nowhere. Our purpose is to extend, invoke, build upon, and contribute to a global conversation about our common humanity.

The legacy of such conversations is present in new ideas that aid reflexive practice, in visions for the future that inspire actions here and now. As foreshadowed, an apposite example of the unfolding nature of human rights work is the long fought for historic apology in 2008 to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders given by the former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, early in his term. This was an important gesture by the then new government in its attempt to build relations of peace with the country’s first peoples. It was an acknowledgement that the human rights of Indigenous Australians had been systematically and purposefully denied through wrongful and inhuman policies in the past. This apology (so contentious in the making) underscored the very contradictions at the heart of the Australian polity and culture, fashioned as these have been through colonialism and paranoid nationalism.

What, then, is hoped to be achieved as the legacy and vision of this book? We argue that we need to appreciate that cultivating a human rights and peace consciousness is choice-less. And, intrinsic to this are necessary conversations that we need to have, that we cannot avoid. That is, there is a moral imperative to engender and sustain an ethical praxis that is motivated by a concern and commitment for how we live with each other. In doing so, we need to link experience substantively to education and vision, as these are mutually sustaining.

Importantly, in cultivating a human rights and peace consciousness we do not think that the approach can ever be merely instrumental (indeed, such an approach is dangerous and harmful). A principle, a process, an apology – these are only part of the narrative. The legacy itself is in the activation, energizing, and inspiration to move towards (to know, to listen, to understand) the whole story, and this is something that can never be reduced to some measurement or formula. Cultivating a human rights and peace consciousness, therefore, is always characterized by walking a tightrope of being human. We think the chapters in this volume will provide some of the muscle required for such an exercise.

Structure and Organization

As stated above, the book is presented in three sections. Part I refers to ‘Theories’, Part II deals with ‘Practices’ and Part III touches on ‘Contexts’.

Part I deals with some of the contemporary and emerging principles underpinning the theoretical framework of the issues affecting Human Rights and Peace. GOH Bee Chen begins with a bold proposal for the articulation and adoption of an International Peace Charter, a much-needed international instrument for nurturing and sustaining human peace. State, non-state and individual actors alike share the universal responsibility for peace-building efforts. The individual is the primary actor, a theme consistent with the ideals of Human Rights. In the relevant context of Human Rights and Peace, a Charter that can help guide and promote human conduct and human behaviour towards nurturing and sustaining peace will bear untold long-term positive consequences. She also attempts to embed this Charter in light of a consideration of karmic principles in the development of contemporary International Law. This chapter is seen as both thought-provoking and cutting-edge, no less controversial, in looking beyond the current frontiers of intellectual thought on International Law and International Relations.

The following chapter highlights the importance of an emerging social science of human rights and peace-building and is one of a number of chapters in this book that engages with human rights beyond the usual legal parameters. Baden Offord and John Ryan, both cultural studies practitioners working respectively in the university and secondary school sectors in Australia, focus on human rights education in their chapter. They argue that strengthening the capacity of a peace-building society depends on institutions where human rights and social justice are present and that education is a core institution where this occurs in both complex and paradoxical ways. After developing a theoretical background for understanding how curriculum and human rights interact, Offord and Ryan explore how human rights education is connected to the experience of the student encounter with real social environments in which human rights is discussed, practised and reported through identity and story. As their approach utilizes cultural studies pedagogy, they provide an overview of how human rights and cultural studies thinking intersect. In the final section of the chapter they analyse an innovative event called Everybody ’s Business: Human Rights and Social Justice in the 21st Century, which was designed and developed by high school students together with their teachers and with a local regional university in Australia. By drawing on this case study, Offord and Ryan seek to show that cultural studies pedagogy is deeply aligned to UNESCO’s approach to human rights education.

Riccardo Baldissone in his philosophical chapter argues that the spreading of a human rights culture is bringing new life to human rights inscriptions, but simultaneously exposing their cultural and historical limits as the expression mainly of Western modern discourse. In this chapter, he thoughtfully and carefully argues for a broader theoretical framework that could transcend such limits and better sustain and articulate human rights claims of human dignity and well-being. In particular, Baldissone assiduously develops a broader framework in the shape of a genealogy of human rights. In Baldissone’s exploration, medieval legal experts consolidated the theoretical framework for the definition of rights that has endured to modern times. Human rights entitlement, he proposes, was construed on the model of the immediate universalization first affirmed by medieval Canonists and restated by Enlightenment thinkers. The chapter argues that the very supposition of an immediate human sameness involves a de facto assimilationist bias. Baldissone suggests that the construction of human rights as historical products rather than natural prerogatives would be an important step towards the acknowledgement of human multiplicities, because it would entail the recognition that human beings are not only bearers, but also producers of rights. Such recognition, he maintains, could grant all human beings, and not only their synecdochical representatives, the entitlement both to claim human rights and to participate in human rights ongoing production.

Central to any discussion and analysis of human rights and peace in the 21st century are issues of how to respond to war and conflict, how to resolve these human catastrophes through prevention and transformation. Kevin Clements, in his chapter, investigates the diverse ways in which modern and postmodern warfare has changed over the last 50 years. In this chapter, he analyses the ways in which inter state conflict has given way to intra state conflict and explores the issues that fuel such conflict. Clements argues that there are a range of complex challenges facing analysts in this new landscape of war and conflict. As examples, he addresses issues of citizenship, inclusion-exclusion from economic, social and political institutions and what drives minority and majority groups to use violence in pursuit of their economic, political and social objectives. What Clements makes patently clear is that the whole idea of a relatively impermeable nation state, capable of defending its borders against other states, makes very little sense in an era of transnational crime, politics, pandemics and extremism. Clements offers an incisive diagnosis of these ‘new wars’ and the role of violence in the 21st century followed by an exploration of creative nonviolent ways of responding to the national, regional and global challenges that the world faces in relation to political, economic and climactic uncertainty. Clements gives particular attention to ways in which individuals, groups and nations might begin enlarging boundaries of compassion in the pursuit of both justice and peace.

The final chapter in Part I is by the academic and writer Janie Conway-Herron. In her chapter, she makes a very powerful case for the efficacy and value of storytelling and human rights. She argues that storytelling is the seed for human rights activism as it involves personal witnessing as an authentic account. However, she also acknowledges that human rights momentum through narrative expression depends on the cultural and political contexts in which the stories are told. Through a quilted approach of theory and self-reflection, Conway-Herron examines the value of storytelling as a fundamental means of resistance to all forms of oppression. In her examples of storytelling and storyteller she focuses in part on the Aboriginal experience in Australia through the writings of the notable Indigenous Australian author Ruby Langford Ginibi, who she describes as a true storyteller. In the second part of the chapter, Conway-Herron turns her attention to the value of storytelling and human rights through her extraordinary experiences of teaching writing workshops to Burmese women refugees camped on the Thai/ Burma border. Drawing on these life-changing experiences her overarching argument in the chapter is that human rights are powerfully brought to life through story-telling – opening up the possibilities for reconciliation, understanding and justice.

Part II proceeds to investigate certain relevant ‘Practices’. The Honourable Michael Kirby takes the reader through a long, hard road of human rights and peace in Cambodia. Kirby was appointed Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for Human Rights in Cambodia, a position established pursuant to the Paris Peace Agreement. Even though this Agreement seemingly put an end to the two decades of conflicts characterized by war, revolution, genocide and territorial aggression in Cambodia, violations against human rights persisted and continued. Kirby provides an insightful and personal account of the effectiveness of the post of Special Representative in Cambodia, and the successes in terms of certain outcomes achieved, despite the limitations of such a post.

We then turn to the situation in Tibet, a region that has attracted international attention with regard to human rights violations, no less due to the voice of His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet XIV. Michael Davis puts forth the argument that the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples put China in a paradoxical position through the voting process. This came about with China voting in favour of the said Declaration while at the same time denying the existence of Indigenous Peoples on Chinese territory. Davis goes on to examine China’s relationship with Tibet, beginning with the so-called modern relationship with the 1951 Seventeen-Point Agreement between China and Tibet, and China’s continuing failure to abide by its commitments to the protection of its ‘national minorities’.

Another window on China is provided by Sev Ozdowski’s account of the Beijing Olympics 2008, and human rights issues related to this globally-celebrated event. Ozdowski maintains that in vying to host the Olympics China made a promise to improve its domestic protection of human rights which, sadly, was not fulfilled. On the contrary, he observes that the opposite might have been the case and that, in effect, an acceleration of gross violations of human rights within China occurred with the hosting of the Beijing Olympics. Critically, Chinese political behaviour seemed to be emboldened and hardened through an internal power consolidation. Thus, China came across to the outside world as far more assertive, especially in foreign affairs, than before.

The next chapter turns towards Australia and the practice of teaching and learning. Rob Garbutt focuses on what he calls the transformative pedagogy of performing human rights and peace. In this chapter, Garbutt explores the interrelated concepts of peace, human rights and belonging, each of which he argues is continually in the process of being negotiated and contested but never finally achieved. To examine these themes, he analyses three human rights projects in Australia which operate at the local level and which aim to expand settled notions of peace by challenging established forms of local and national belonging. The projects he analyses are the national Sorry Book project that operated in the early 2000s, the Living Library movement and the Remembering and Healing Old Wounds, both of which commenced in the regional town of Lismore, NSW in late 2000s. Garbutt contends that the effectiveness of these projects lies in the way they demand a personal and public performance that involves both the mainstream and marginalized groups. Each project challenges the status quo by engaging people’s bodies in thought-provoking culturally safe situations, which place positive value on the experiences and humanity of all involved.

Dale Bagshaw’s chapter concludes Part II. Bagshaw proposes to challenge dominant Western constructs of mediation which have been imported into many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, in particular from the United States, and she outlines the issues and dilemmas involved in building culturally fluent models of mediation. This, she believes, acknowledges traditional ways of resolving conflict but also redresses power imbalances and challenges structural inequalities to ensure just outcomes for all involved. Bagshaw astutely examines the influence of culture and the cultural context on mediation and emphasizes the need to appreciate non-Western values and approaches to dispute resolution, whilst at the same time being mindful to address issues of social justice and human rights in order to bui...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Activating Human Rights and Peace: An Overview of Theory, Practice and Context
• PART I: THEORIES
• PART II: PRACTICES
• PART III: CONTEXTS
• Index