Reviews

Review of: Ecofeminism and Systems Thinking

Feminist and ecological scholarship are interrelated by the form and functioning of systems, which many a researcher in the global north and south, have held responsible for being the source of marginalizing women and nature, respectively. However, Anne Stephens’ book is not about the sources of women’s subordination and or environmental degradation, but rather the theoretical and methodological basis of the compatibility between the two and the systems that function to bring about such compatibility. She introduces her readers to the linkages between feminist and environmental systems-thinking, using varied dichotomies of critique that mainly include: women vs. nature; nature vs. culture; culture vs. women; environment vs. systems; and women vs. systems. These dichotomies are embodied in two types of sociological thought: (a) ecofeminism; and (b) critical systems thinking. Ecofeminism evolved and continues to do so around the assumption that the source of women’s lesser position in society when compared to men, is traceable to the human and non-human stressors on the environment on which women traditionally depend to fulfill their socially-ascribed roles, especially in terms of securing food and medicine for the home. Critical systems thinking on the other hand, centers on what drives the complexity of social change, and the methods used to research and intervene to make such change beneficial to society. Anne separates ecofeminism into two theoretical strands, that is; cultural and nature ecofeminism. The former, to which the book is inclined, lays emphasis on women’s socially-prescribed care responsibilities as the avenue through which they link with Read more

Civil Disobedience in Islam–a Contemporary Debate

Research Assistants Khurūj 0

Civil Disobedience in Islam, written by Muhammad Haniff Hassan (2018) provides an analysis of opposing arguments that either support or condemn political dissent. Hassan defines civil disobedience as a pacifist movement against an authority that breaks the law and that is orchestrated for the purpose of producing a change within the governing institution that has been judged corrupt or unjust. The primary debates are centered around khurūj, maslahah-mafsadah, and claims of ijmā`. In this essay, we summarize Hassan’s findings and provide a brief comment about the scope and limits of his work. Khurūj is the act of rejection or malalignment with an authority figure or ruler. Maslahah-mafsadah is the societal balance between benefits (maslahah) and harm (mafsadah). The claim of ijmā` is the concept that if an idea, law, or norm is agreed upon by everyone or reaches consensus, then it is considered of similar importance to scripture and tradition. Arguments against civil disobedience have a significant amount of scriptural evidence drawn to support this perspective. However, many scholars have concluded that a large majority of scripture within the Qur’ān and Hadīths cannot be argued as definitive evidence and taken for what it says, rather most tend to be nondefinitive scripture and reliant on the interpretations of the words and context of the situation. The issue of khurūj emphasizes this stance, as the act of khurūj, is completely reliant on the context and perspectives of the individual/society. Khurūj against a just and fair leader is never permissible, however khurūj against Read more

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

Prof. Souaiaia Capitalism, Migration, Nationalism, Supremacism 0

While working on my recent work, Muslims and the Western Conception of Rights, I struggled with the application of the systems thinking framework to the topic of human rights. I wanted the framework to yield practical recommendations that promote and foster fundamental rights. By the end of the project, I realized that such expectations are a limiting burden, not indicative of the utility and usefulness of the approach. The utility of the framework should not be judged by one’s ability to successfully apply it, but by its capacity to explain. Reading Border and Rule underscored the importance of nuanced understanding of the analysis framework over its application to critical human rights issues, such as migration, labor, and economic rights. Among the fundamental features of systems thinking framework are its capacity to exploit the properties of dynamicity and interconnectedness of systems to identify determinant forces that shape human rights as lived experience and as a conceptual discourse. Harsha Walia, perhaps without explicitly identifying these properties, masterfully identifies the structures, instruments, and actors involved in the displacement of persons and peoples and exposes the systems that produced them. For instance, Walia disputes the qualification of migration as a crisis in and of itself in favor of presenting it as “the outcome of the actual crises of capitalism, conquest, and climate change.” She explains migration, as a global event by linking it to national issues such as labor, prisons, and domestic policies. She traces the cause of mass migration to settlers’ and colonizers’ Read more

The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority

Research Assistants Uyghurs 0

Years before COVID-19 was first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the Chinese government had already set its targets on another purportedly dangerous pathogen: Islamist extremism, which Chinese officials said was ‘infecting’ the Uyghurs, the predominantly Muslim indigenous peoples of northwest China’s Xinjiang region. In 2014 and 2015, the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s bio-politicisation of this supposed threat reached its zenith, with the PRC Justice Department’s Party Committee Secretary suggesting that some 30 per cent of Uyghur villagers were ‘polluted by religious extremism’ and required ‘concentrated education’ (203). The secretary added: ‘when the 30% are transformed […] the village is basically cleansed’ (203). Long before the world was reintroduced to the concept of ‘quarantining’ as a measure to avoid the spread of COVID-19, the PRC had deemed such treatment necessary to deal with the Uyghurs ‘in order to ensure that the alleged infection of ‘‘extremism’’ did not spread to others’ (203), as Sean R. Roberts writes in his exceptional new book, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Campaign Against Xinjiang’s Muslims. Roberts, an associate professor of the practice of international affairs and director of the International Development Studies Program at George Washington University, convincingly shows through extensive interviews and Uyghur language sources that the PRC’s claims of a large-scale Uyghur ‘terrorist threat’ are profoundly disingenuous. Yet they found purchase following 9/11, allowing the PRC to fold the Uyghurs into the ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) in order to suppress them. This, however, created a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy of Uyghur Read more

Is social media-enabled collective behavior creating a crisis?

Prof. Souaiaia Social Media 0

Characterizing the effects of scaled-up communication technology on societies around the world as a global phenomenon with new risks to humanity, seventeen researchers, from anthropology, biology, philosophy, psychology, and some interdisciplinary programs, penned the research note, Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior, explaining the nature of the problem and recommending solutions. The main thesis of the paper is the proposition that advances in communication technologies have accelerated social change, modified traditional social networks, and created new risks. These changes resulted in a new form of collective behavior on a global scale, making social systems even more complex and more difficult to study, understand, and explain. The paper succeeds in highlighting the fact that social media-driven collective behavior has consequential effects on all areas of life. In other words, the scaled-up collective behavior not only impacts local cultures, ecosystems, and social order, but it does so on a global scale with serious impact on natural and human resources. Although the research note has clear bias towards providing public policy recommendations, the authors did not neglect to draw attention to the need for academic disciplines (and researchers) to adapt to the fast-changing world. For instance, the authors find that the traditional peer-review process might be too slow to tackle the new challenges and that both changes to that system and the adoption of new pathways, such as “multiinstitution and interdisciplinary collaboration” might be needed. Specifically, the authors recommend that universities embrace and adopt changes through funding allocations, hiring plans, and tenure and promotion Read more

Muslims and the Western Conception of Rights

Research Assistants Human Rights, Supremacism 0

Editorial Review by M. R. Whitehead Since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, little has changed. Human rights abuses have persisted around the globe, across cultures and societies, and despite the timeworn discussion of how to prevent them. This book pushes back against the discourse’s inertia, putting moral universalism and cultural relativism in conversation with one another to reveal flaws in Enlightenment and Islamic traditions and thinkers. It instead taps the holistic systems thinking framework (STF) to illuminate the patterns of human rights abuses—and how those rights might be protected around the world. Engaging with Islamic and Western, historical and contemporary and relativist and universalist thought, the book, Muslims and the Western Conception of Rights, is vital in its groundedness, taking an aspirational concept and tethering it to reality. It will not only be a necessary resource to scholars and researchers engaging in topics concerning human rights, Islamic societies, and foreign policy, but also an accessible text for readers grappling with the cycles of war, power, and the historical narratives behind them. Rejoining William Talbott’s question which human rights should be universal?, Ahmed Souaiaia proposes a different foundation for human rights discourse. He lays bare the common threads that connect the most egregious human rights abuses in both Western societies since Enlightenment and Muslim communities since the 7th century. The body of evidence in support of the proposed framework consists of five proofs organized in three sections. In the first section, Souaiaia interrogates two passionate authors whose stated Read more

Achieving Human Rights

Editorial Team 0

Achieving Human Rights, a compilation of fourteen chapters, attempts to provide a coherent account of the struggle to achieve hu- man rights in the early years of the twenty-first century. Falk goes to great length to personalize, for readers, the practice and protection of human rights by locating freedom and responsibility in the countless daily decisions everyone makes about the treatment of others. There- fore, this existential level of implementation for human rights implies a refusal to treat otherness as a set of alien abstractions. The author convincingly reminds us that the struggle for human rights must begin at home, not just in the home country, that is, within our own family and immediate neighborhood. Part I offers a brief introduction of a necessary utopianism, the future for human rights, Orientalism and international law to engage in a deliberative and participatory human rights within a global world. However, while the utopianism element is to encourage a radical revision of citizenship, the reader is left to question how the citizen pilgrim in such a global setting represents an overall quest for sustain- ability and equality. For instance, in Chapter 2, ‘The Future of Human Rights,’ the author argues that the right of power is well-financed and controls every modern society (p. 38). While the reader expects a future solution to human rights, Falk acknowledges that a significant development over the years is reflected by the geographic move away from Europe to Istanbul, which can claim a location that is at least Read more

Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World

Editorial Team Public Health 0

Reviewed by Unni Gopinathan Institutions of global governance play a critical role in diffusing norms and influencing the behaviour of states and non-state actors [1, 2]. Previously, scholars have examined how policies promoted by global governance institutions impact human rights [3], how these institutions can advance human rights norms [4–6], and how organizational culture influences the adoption of policies promoting human rights [7]. A broad range of global governance institutions influence areas that intersect with health and human rights. Yet no comprehensive comparative assessment of how these institutions have operationalized health-related human rights have been produced. Against this background, the volume ‘Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World’, edited by Benjamin Mason Meier and Lawrence O. Gostin, brings together an impressive group of academics, individuals from UN and international civil society organizations, and policymakers to make a far-reaching contribution to close this analytical gap [8]. Following a clear and logical structure, the book’s introductory chapter and first section clarify its expansive focus on the underlying social, economic and political causes (e.g. ‘determinants’) of health and illness, thereby broadening the scope of global institutions beyond those we commonly consider to do ‘global health’ work. The next three chapters are about the World Health Organization (WHO)—the world’s normative authority on global health. These chapters give insights into how WHO at critical junctures in its history, from the drafting of its constitution to facing the HIV/AIDS pandemic, has struggled to reconcile a technical role focused on standard-setting with its Read more

Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa

Editorial Team Colonialism, Economics, Poverty, Property rights 0

In Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa, Franklin Obeng-Odoom offers a new comprehensive exploration of inequalities within Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world, drawing on stratification economics. The book offers compelling and crucial insight into the deficiencies of mainstream economics when it comes to addressing the roots of poverty and inequality in African countries and provides new evidence of neocolonialism and exploitation of African resources across the continent, yet the challenge remains of how to bring African countries the rewards of their past, present and future property.

For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq

Review Editors Aggression, Colonialism, Legitimacy 0

Why is the use of international law becoming increasingly prevalent in global affairs? What are the consequences of the widespread use of such an incoherent, colonial and imperial law as the lingua franca? In For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq, Ayça Çubukçu asks these highly important questions and reveals the ambivalent role of international law in legitimising and/or delegitimising human rights violations. The book illustrates how different and sometimes colliding understandings of justice, human rights, legitimacy and international law co-existed in response to the Iraq occupation through the case of the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) (6). The WTI was organised from 2003 to 2005 by a transnational network of anti-war activists (eyewitnesses, lawyers, journalists, scholars and so forth) in Barcelona, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Genoa, Istanbul, Lisbon, London, Mumbai, New York, Rome, Seoul, Stockholm and several cities in Japan in order ‘to tell and disseminate the truth about the Iraq war’ (3-4). Çubukçu defines herself as ‘a participant observer during the conceptualisation and practical formation of the WTI, committed as an activist and anthropologist at once’ (3). In addition to creating ‘an ethnographically grounded critical analysis of the politics of human rights, international law, and cosmopolitanism in the early twenty-first century’ (12), with this book Çubukçu forges a space where the politics of human rights and international law can be discussed in relation to other cases too: after all, there are other victims of empire. Read more