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Intangible cultural heritage (ICH), made up of all immaterial manifestations of culture, represents the variety of living heritage of humanity as well as the most important vehicle of cultural diversity. The main ‘constitutive factors’ of ICH are represented by the ‘self-identification’ of this heritage as an essential element of the cultural identity of its creators and bearers; by its constant recreation in response to the historical and social evolution of the communities and groups concerned; by its connection with the cultural identity of these communities and groups; by its authenticity; and by its indissoluble relationship with human rights. The international community has recently become conscious that ICH needs and deserves international safeguarding, triggering a legal process which culminated with the adoption in 2003 of the UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. This Convention correctly highlights the main elements of ICH and is based on the right philosophical rationale, but its operational part – structured on the model provided by the 1972 World Heritage Convention – appears to be inadequate to ensure appropriate safeguarding of the specificities of intangible heritage. This article argues that to correct such inadequacy, international safeguarding of ICH must rely on the concomitant application, even though in an indirect manner, of international human rights law, for the reason that ICH represents a component of cultural human rights and an essential prerequisite to ensure the actual realization and enjoyment of individual and collective rights of its creators and bearers.

This special issue of the Health and Human Rights Journal constitutes another step on the path toward making the case for human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to health. In 2003, the United Nations (UN) outlined the pillars of an HRBA to development, which include universality and inalienability, indivisibility, interdependence and interrelatedness, non-discrimination and equality, participation and inclusion, and accountability and the rule of law. Since then, leaders from national governments and UN agencies have repeatedly emphasized the need to operationalize human rights and incorporate them into the implementation of policies, programs, projects, and other health-related interventions with a view to enhancing effectiveness. Nevertheless, implementation efforts regarding HRBAs to health and development have faced, and continue to face, multiple challenges, including some degree of miscommunication and polarization between different fields, where the imperatives of health and human rights are not always seen as complementary and rights imperatives are misconstrued to ignore all concerns regarding cost-effectiveness. Even for sympathetic actors and institutions, there is a need to gather sufficient evidence of the impact of human rights to be persuasive to policymakers, donors, and the public alike.

This article examines how international judicial interventions in mass atrocity influence representations of violence. It relies on content analysis of 3,387 articles and opinion pieces in leading newspapers from eight Western countries, compiled into the Darfur Media Dataset, as well as in-depth interviews to assess how media frame violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. Overall, it finds that UN Security Council and International Criminal Court interventions increase representations of mass violence as crime in all countries under investigation, although each country applies the crime frame at a different level. Reporting suffering and categorizing the violence as genocide also varies across countries. Comparative case studies identify country specific structural and cultural forces that appear to account for these differences. Multilevel multivariate analyses confirm the explanatory power of cultural sensitivities and policy practices, while individual- and organization-level factors, such as reporters’ gender and the newspapers’ ideological orientation, also have explanatory power.

The authors assert that sovereignty can no longer be seen as a protection against interference, but as a charge of responsibility where the state is accountable to both domestic and external constituencies. In internal conflicts in Africa, sovereign states have often failed to take responsibility for their own citizens' welfare and for the humanitarian consequences of conflict, leaving the victims with no assistance. This book shows how that responsibility can be exercised by states over their own population, and by other states in assistance to their fellow sovereigns.

How do bureaucracies pattern durable inequalities? Predominant approaches emphasize the role of administrative categories, which prioritize certain populations for valued resources based on broader regimes of human worth. This article extends this body of work by examining how categorical inequalities become embedded within administrative infrastructures and institutional pathways. I develop this argument through a case study of the United States’ refugee resettlement program. Drawing together previously unseen government statistics, expert interviews, and documentary analysis, I show that U.S. resettlement is organized through administrative pipelines that create path dependent imbalances in the distribution of scarce resettlement spaces. Social and political logics of immigrant worthiness are important, yet a full understanding of these imbalances requires attention to the tendency of pipelines to become self-reproducing. I identify three factors that account for this tendency: calculative rationales, administrative reactivity, and structured visibility. This three-part conceptualization of pipelines can be applied to other institutional contexts to study the origins, dynamics, and durability of social inequalities. My findings also demonstrate the analytically autonomous role of policy administration in shaping ethnoracial imbalances in immigrant selection.

This article explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights. After 1918, the League of Nations developed a comprehensive machinery for guaranteeing the national minorities of eastern Europe. But by 1940 the League's policies were widely regarded as a failure and the coalition of forces which had supported them after the First World War had disintegrated. German abuse of the system after 1933, and the Third Reich's use of ethnic German groups as fifth columns to undermine the Versailles settlement were cited by east European politicians as sufficient justification for a new approach which would combine mass expulsion, on the one hand, with a new international doctrine of individual human rights on the other. The Great Powers supported this because they thereby escaped the specific commitments which the previous arrangements had imposed on them, and which Russian control over post-war eastern Europe rendered no longer practicable. But they also supported it because the new rights regime had no binding legal force. In respect, therefore, of the degree to which the principle of absolute state sovereignty was threatened by these arrangements, the rights regime of the new UN represented a considerable weakening of international will compared with the interwar League. But acquiescing in a weaker international organization was probably the price necessary for US and Soviet participation.

This paper offers a critical analytic reconstruction of some of the main symbolic properties of annual UN Holocaust and Rwandan genocide commemorations since 2005. Applying a discourse‐historical approach (Wodak and Meyer 2010), it retraces how themes of guilt, responsibility, evil and redemption are woven together across annual commemorative performances in the hope of stabilizing shared patterns of cultural translation of the significance of these atrocities to globally dispersed communities. UN commemorative discourse characteristically links memories of Holocaust and Rwandan trauma in a ‘chain of communication’ with those of other episodes of brutality (e.g., Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur) chiefly to convey the continuity of human barbarity across time and endorse certain presuppositions regarding the fate of a fallen humanity in this more ‘post‐secular’ age. As scenes of mourning, UN commemorations unite participating international delegations in their expressions of grief for the victims of ‘preventable tragedies’ in the past but also, it must be said, their uncertainty regarding new horrors likely to occur in the future. The duty to remember is reiterated continuously as both a mark of respect to those who have already perished and as a warning of atrocities yet to unfold. This paper explores how the historical constancy of violence is interpreted by the UN through a detailed critical analysis of its recently inaugurated ‘remembrance through education’ programme aimed at a transnational collective learning from atrocity.

Although slavery is illegal throughout the world, we learned from Kevin Bales's highly praised exposé, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, that more than twenty-seven million people--in countries from Pakistan to Thailand to the United States--are still trapped in bondage. With this new volume, Bales, the leading authority on modern slavery, looks beyond the specific instances of slavery described in his last book to explore broader themes about slavery's causes, its continuation, and how it might be ended. Written to raise awareness and deepen understanding, and touching again on individual lives around the world, this book tackles head-on one of the most urgent and difficult problems facing us today.<br> <br> <br> <br> Each of the chapters in Understanding Global Slavery explores a different facet of global slavery. Bales investigates slavery's historical roots to illuminate today's puzzles. He explores our basic ideas about what slavery is and how the phenomenon fits into our moral, political, and economic worlds. He seeks to explain how human trafficking brings people into our cities and how the demand for trafficked workers, servants, and prostitutes shapes modern slavery. And he asks how we can study and measure this mostly hidden crime. Throughout, Bales emphasizes that to end global slavery, we must first understand it. This book is a step in that direction.

The UNESCO Associated Schools Project emphasizes world community, human rights, and international understanding. This article investigates the emergence and global diffusion of the project from 1953 to 2001, estimating the influence of national, regional, and world characteristics on the likelihood of a country adopting a UNESCO school. It also addresses the effects of national linkages to the international human rights regime. The results reveal that adoption rates are positively influenced by stronger national links to the human rights regime throughout the period and that various measures of the density of global society influence adoption, particularly after the institutionalization of human rights. Finally, the results demonstrate that democratic countries and nations with more expanded educational systems tend to adopt a UNESCO school before the period of human rights institutionalization. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the literature on the global environment and the diffusion of innovations in education.

When do national movements adopt or reject international agendas? This question regarding the relationship between global and local thinking goes to the heart of the current globalization debates. This study examines the contrasting responses from the Chinese and Indian women's movements to the agenda adopted by the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The contrast challenges the dominant assumption that global thinking can substitute for local thinking. The article shows how national movements decided for or against international agendas through context-dependent meaning-making processes. The Chinese and Indian movements drew on the international agenda to pursue similar national policy goals. Each reached its decision on the international agenda through a similar sequence of interactions with the government. However, due to mediation by nationally unique combinations of political rules and policy-related timing, the two movements attached opposite meanings to the international agenda. The Chinese movement embraced the international agenda and reinterpreted it by emphasizing its difference from the government position; the Indian movement used the international agenda as a surrogate target and rejected it by emphasizing its similarities to the government position. The article also proposes an alternative conceptualization of authoritarianism and democracy that understands better international influences on social movement dynamics.