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In Human Rights from Below, Jim Ife shows how human rights and community development are problematic terms but powerful ideals, and that each is essential for understanding and practising the other. Ife contests that practitioners - advocates, activists, workers and volunteers - can better empower and protect communities when human rights are treated as more than just a specialist branch of law or international relations, and that human rights can be better realised when community development principles are applied. The book offers a long overdue assessment of how human rights and community development are invariably interconnected. It highlights how critical it is to understand the two as a basis for thinking about and taking action to address the serious challenges facing the world in the twenty-first century. Written both for students and for community development and human rights workers, Human Rights from Below brings together the important fields of human rights and community development, to enrich our thinking of both

If social work is to be truly international, it needs to address newly emerging international issues, specifically terrorism and global warming. Both of these raise profound implications for human rights and social justice, and hence social workers have significant contributions to make to addressing such issues. However to do so, social workers in western countries will need also to accept the loss of legitimacy of the western modernity, so that their theory and practice can be influenced by post-colonial writers and alternative knowledges and wisdoms from the global south, and from indigenous people. A number of curriculum proposals are made, with a view to developing more appropriate international social work education programs. Si el trabajo social tiene que ser verdaderamente internacional, necesita dirigirse a los emergentes acontecimientos recientes, específicamente al terrorismo y al calentamiento global. Estos dos temas originan profundas implicaciones para los derechos humanos y la justicia social, y por ello, los trabajadores sociales tienen contribuciones significativas al respecto. Aún así, para poder hacer esto, los trabajadores sociales de los países occidentales necesitan aceptar la pérdida de legitimidad de la modernidad occidental, de forma que su teoría y práctica pueda ser influenciada por escritores postcoloniales y conocimientos y saberse alternativos del sur global y de las personas indígenas. Se realizan un número de propuestas curriculares con la perspectiva de desarrollar programas educativos internacionales en el trabajo social más apropiados

The way in which a discourse of human needs has been appropriated by neo-liberal perspectives within modernity is well-documented. The construction and definition of "needs" by professionals has been criticised as "the dictatorship of needs", and has readily excluded people other than professionals and managers from the definition of need. Need becomes objectified, something to be "assessed" by professionals using expert methodologies, rather than involving democratic participation. Here need becomes another excluding professional category, apparently objective and value-free, but in reality ideological. Furthermore, the deficit approach inherent in the idea of "need" runs counter to the more positive "strengths" approach of social work. "Rights" as an alternative to "needs" is superficially a more empowering discourse, and moving from a needs-based to a rights-based approach is therefore intuitively seductive, and has evidently appealed to social workers. However, ideas of "rights", and especially "human rights" are also embedded within modernity and the privileging of the expert. The conventional discourse of human rights as defined by the UN or other legal bodies, applied universally, and protected through laws and legal institutions, is a negation of any democratic understanding of rights. "Human rights", like need, thus becomes an objectified discourse of the powerful about the powerless. However the idea of human rights, if constructed from within a more postmodern framing, has the potential to move our understanding of a shared humanity beyond the constraints of modernity. Thus human rights per se is an inadequate, and potentially dangerous, formulation for progressive social work, unless democratic participation is restored to the human rights project. If human rights are understood as being embedded in a community of reciprocal rights and responsibilities, rather than as "things" possessed by individuals, human rights from below can become a powerful framework for the democratic renewal of practice.