Search results

Human rights are among our most pressing issues today, yet rights promoters have reached an impasse in their effort to achieve rights for all. Human Rights for Pragmatists explains why: activists prioritize universal legal and moral norms, backed by the public shaming of violators, but in fact rights prevail only when they serve the interests of powerful local constituencies. Jack Snyder demonstrates that where local power and politics lead, rights follow. He presents an innovative roadmap for addressing a broad agenda of human rights concerns: impunity for atrocities, dilemmas of free speech in the age of social media, entrenched abuses of women's rights, and more. Exploring the historical development of human rights around the globe, Snyder shows that liberal rights–based states have experienced a competitive edge over authoritarian regimes in the modern era. He focuses on the role of power, the interests of individuals and the groups they form, and the dynamics of bargaining and coalitions among those groups. The path to human rights entails transitioning from a social order grounded in patronage and favoritism to one dedicated to equal treatment under impersonal rules. Rights flourish when they benefit dominant local actors with the clout to persuade ambivalent peers. Activists, policymakers, and others attempting to advance rights should embrace a tailored strategy, one that acknowledges local power structures and cultural practices. Constructively turning the mainstream framework of human rights advocacy on its head, Human Rights for Pragmatists offers tangible steps that all advocates can take to move the rights project forward.

This paper examines how flexible employment, particularly temporary and part-time employment, affect political support for social policy protection. Although their implications are a priori uncertain, the paper lays out how flexible employment conditions can be expected to generate various kinds of economic insecurity for workers that ought in turn to spur support for social-welfare policies. The paper finds broad support for such expectations in individual-level survey data from 15 EU member states. In particular, part-time employment, temporary employment and their combination tend to increase several measures of an individual's subjective economic insecurity. Further, partly due to such increases, the same measures of flexible employment tend to spur support for social policy assistance targeted at the unemployed.

La irrupción de la comunicación a través de redes sociales obliga a los juristas a ofrecer una respuesta razonada a la siguiente cuestión: ¿los límites de la libertad de expresión son distintos si el mismo mensaje se vierte en la red o si se difunde a través de los canales tradicionales de comunicación?

Para ofrecer una respuesta desde el Derecho, resulta preciso concretar cuáles son aquellos elementos que diferencian ambos tipos de comunicación y que resultan relevantes para el análisis. A nuestro juicio, estos elementos son los siguientes: la posición del receptor del mensaje, que ha dejado de ser pasiva para convertirse en un usuario activo; la posición de relativa igualdad del emisor del mensaje; la gran cantidad y variedad de contenidos en la red; y el aumento de la capacidad de interrelación comunicativa.

Identificados estos elementos, deben confrontarse con los parámetros clásicos que el Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos ha utilizado para marcar los límites de la libertad de expresión. Los parámetros que se consideran relevantes para el análisis son: la materia sobre la que versa el mensaje; la intención del emisor; quién emite el mensaje; a través de qué canal; y el ámbito geográfico donde se difunde.

De esta confrontación puede concluirse que, con la jurisprudencia de la Corte Europea en la mano, no existen argumentos jurídicos que justifiquen una distinción en los límites de la libertad de expresión en función de si el mensaje se difunde o no a través de redes sociales.

What explains ethnic cleansing? Recent research has used systematic evidence to explore the causes of civilian victimization and mass killings. Yet, comparable studies that focus on ethnic cleansing are still rare. This article conceptualizes ethnic cleansing as a group-level phenomenon that is distinct from civilian victimization or mass killings and studies its causes by using systematic evidence from Europe 1900–2000. The article makes two theoretical moves. First, it highlights the salience of non-ethnic cleavages such as social class as a background condition that has the ability to hinder ethnic cleansing. Second, it distinguishes between two causal mechanisms, one that considers wars as 'strategic environments' and the other as 'transformative experiences', that relate to the proximate causes of ethnic cleansing. Using original data from 20th-century Europe, the empirical analysis offers two main findings. First, it shows that salient social cleavages, measured through levels of land inequality, political competition, and support for left-wing parties, substantially decrease the risk of ethnic cleansing. Second, the analysis suggests that the arguments that underscore psychological mechanisms related to wartime experiences provide a better explanation for ethnic cleansing than the arguments that emphasize the role of strategic wartime aims. This finding is further supported by a brief discussion of key cases in which both causal mechanisms predict ethnic cleansing. The results highlight the importance of treating ethnic cleansing as a conceptually separate phenomenon and offer implications for the debate on democracy and mass ethnic violence.

Currently, we can note positive trends in the formation and development of social service institutions for families. The dynamics of the main statistical indicators characterizing the formation and development of institutions for social services to the family indicates that the number of institutions for social services for families and the system of social protection of the population has increased signifi cantly. At the same time, the burden on specialists dictates the need to develop various mechanisms for working with families. This paper deals with the development and application of cases in social work with families.