Nationalism

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