PLACA's Graduate Seminar and Speaker Series offers intertwined perspectives on an annual theme. Recent seminars have focused on political participation, economic development, social policy, and poverty alleviation.
Fall 2011 Series
AAS 400/600: Human Rights in The Americas
Professor Kwame Dixon, Department of African American Studies
Barely a half century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the international human rights movement, despite some impressive victories, is in chaotic disarray. The human rights paradigm is being challenged, if not undermined, by leading strategic actors. Security in the name of democracy has triumphed human rights protection. Moreover, after more than fifty years of international human rights treaties, conventions, covenants, and strong civil society, human rights violations – from genocide, to ethnic cleansing, to the use of child soldiers in warfare – serve to undermine global stability.
Human Rights in the Americas will examine some of the key problems facing the international human rights community and global civil society in their attempt to forge a new human rights paradigm.
The objective of the course is to:
- Understand the language of international human rights and review how international human rights operate.
- Analyze the human rights practices and contradictions of the US, Latin American and Caribbean states as well as other UN member states;
- Understand the role of global/regional civil society in the Americas and the ways they are advancing human rights agendas.
- Understand how Afro, women, and Indigenous (and other groups) peoples use the language, strategies and procedures of international human rights law.
This course will focus on a full range of human rights such as civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights. Thematically, students will be encouraged to think about human rights violations such as ethnic violence and social cleansing, torture and mistreatment, police violence, the death penalty, forced labor, political prisoners, unfair trials, the disappeared as well issues of developmental and structural adjustment within a human rights framework. Students will be expected to place these themes in an international human rights context and provide a cogent, well-developed analysis based on international human rights law and other standards.
Course meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30-10:50am.
Speaker Series details TBA.