Previous Publications
"In the Land of Slavery"
Osha Gray Davidson
Rolling Stone, 8 September 2005
UICHR Advisory Council member Osha Gray Davidson chronicles a journey deep into Brazil's brutal and lawless interior, where tens of thousands of men are still enslaved — and where any attempt to escape ends in an unmarked grave.
Child Labor and Human Rights: Making Children Matter
Burns H. Weston (Editor & Contributor)
Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005
Child Labor and Human Rights, edited by UICHR senior scholar Burns Weston, is a comprehensive examination of the phenomenon of child labor from a human rights perspective. The authors consider the connections between human rights concerns and abusive child labor, the pros and cons of a rights-based approach to the problem, and specific strategies for effecting change. They make an indispensable contribution to the growing effort to abolish abusive and exploitive child labor practices.
More Secure, Less Free? Antiterrorism Policy and Civil Liberties after September 11
Mark Sidel
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Written by UI Associate Professor of Law and UICHR Executive Board member Mark Sidel, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of U.S. antiterror initiatives implemented after the 2001 terrorist attacks. It goes beyond coverage of the Patriot Act, analyzing Total Information Awareness, the Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS), the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II (CAPPS II), and a number of other "second wave" antiterror initiatives. Sidel takes readers behind the headlines to reveal how key provisions of controversial antiterror policies have been buried in state legislation, and how the military has taken over key police functions. More Secure, Less Free? also investigates aspects of American antiterrorism policy largely ignored in other books, including its effects on the American academic world and the nonprofit sector. Additionally, it provides the first international comparisons of antiterrorism policy yet published in an American volume, contrasting security initiatives in Great Britain, Australia, and India with the American experience.
"The Secret File of Abu Ghraib"
Osha Gray Davidson
Rolling Stone, 28 July 2004
New evidence obtained by the author (UICHR Advisory Council member Osha Gray Davidson) provides insight into the abuse and torture of detainees at the Iraqi prison. The 106 files that served as a foundation for this article were turned over to the Center for Public Integrity.
Pre-college Child Labor Modules
Gregory Hamot, Carol Brown, Chivy Sok (Editors)
UICHR, 2004
Children and young adults have an important role to play in eliminating abusive and exploitative child labor. It therefore is important for the world community to do all it can to involve them in this struggle meaningfully. An important starting-point is the secondary school, and in this connection the UICHR worked with a team of highly experienced teachers and education specialists to develop six replicable child labor course modules for inclusion in secondary-school classrooms. The first module introduces students to the concept of human rights and, particularly, children's rights. The remaining five modules focus on specific "worst forms" of child labor: hazardous work, child slavery, child soldiers, trafficking for sexual exploitation, and use of children in drug trade. All are designed to enable teachers of economics, social studies, world history, and other subjects (e.g., literature) to integrate them into their regular courses.
“The Recent History of Human Rights”
Kenneth Cmiel
American Historical Review, 2004
This essay explores recent writing on the history of human rights. Former UICHR director Ken Cmiel asks why there has been, in the past ten years, a spate of new writing on the history of human rights politics and ties the new historiography to the more general optimism about human rights that emerged at the end of the Cold War. This is a comprehensive historiographical survey of the recent history of human rights.
Promoting International Worker Rights through Private Voluntary Initiatives: Public Relations or Public Policy ?
Elliot J. Schrage
UICHR, 2004
This study questions the effectiveness of voluntary codes of conduct adopted by major corporations regarding sweatshop labor. Using four case studies — soccer ball production in Pakistan , coffee production in Central America, toy production in China, and cocoa production in Côte d'Ivoire — Schrage argues that companies that adopt codes often fail to meaningfully implement them. Schrage suggests that company education programs, more aggressive monitoring, and incentive programs for suppliers are necessary steps all too often ignored after a code of conduct is adopted. He also argues that industry-wide efforts are important for the elimination of sweatshop conditions around the world.
"Human Rights, Freedom of Information, and Origins of Third-World Solidarity"
Kenneth Cmiel
Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights
Rutgers University Press, 2003
Truth Claims, by former UICHR director Ken Cmiel, brings together some of the best new work from a variety of disciplinary and geographic perspectives in order to examine the making of human rights claims and the cultural politics of their representations. All of the essays explore the potentialities of an expansive humanistic framework. Here, the authors move beyond the terms — and the limitations — of the universalism/relativism debate that has so defined existing human rights literature.
Critical Race Feminism: A Reader
Adrien Katherine Wing (Editor)
Critical America Series, 2nd Edition
Jeeves Press, 2003
Now in its second edition, Critical Race Feminism presents over 40 readings on the legal status of women of color by leading authors and scholars such as Anita Hill, Lani Guinier, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, and Angela Harris. This second edition features 25 new essays and a new introduction by Adrien Wing. Critical Race Feminism gives voice to African American, Latina, Asian, Native American, and Arab women, both heterosexual and lesbian. Both a forceful statement and a platform for change, the anthology addresses an ambitious range of subjects, from life in the workplace and motherhood to sexual harassment, domestic violence, and other criminal justice issues. Extending beyond national borders, the volume tackles global issues such as the rights of Muslim women, immigration, multiculturalism, and global capitalism.
“Impact of the globalization of capital on human rights”
Rex Honey
GeoJournal, 2003
This article addresses globalization of capital, which has had both positive and negative impacts on human rights. On the positive side are improved health and physical well-being for massive numbers of people. On the negative side are: the oppression of millions as a consequence of the leverage international capital has over government policies and the right of workers; and the growing gap between the haves and have nots, both within and between countries.
"Book Review: Human Rights in Political Transitions—Gettysburg to Bosnia"
Marcella David
Berkley Journal of International Law, 2001
UICHR Advisory Council member, Marcella David, reviews Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia, an interdisiplinary collection of essays edited by Carla Hesse and Robert Post, which examines challenges "associated with transition of violent and repressive regimes into stable, enduring democracies."
Medicine and the Ethics of Care
Diana Fritz Cates (Editor & Contributor) and Paul Lauritzen (Editor)
Georgetown University Press, 2001
UICHR Executive Board member Diana Fritz Cates contributes an article to this volume. In "Caring for Girls and Women Who are Considering Abortion: Rethinking Informed Consent," she argues that girls and women who are considering abortion have a right to respect. Her article elucidates what respect for girls and women requires within the context of abortion counseling. In broader perspective, this article and the entire volume are concerned with encouraging the cultivation of respect, particularly within the medical arena.
The Iowa City Appeal on Advancing the Human Right to Health
Adopted 22 April 2001 by The Global Assembly on Advancing the Human Right to Health
A gathering of more than 275 persons organized by The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, The University of Iowa Global Health Studies Program, and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights of the Harvard University School of Public Health, the Global Assembly was comprised of US and foreign health care providers, legal professionals, and community activists together with faculty and students in public health, medicine, law, and the social sciences from The University of Iowa and other US-based academic institutions.
Co-sponsors at The University of Iowa included the Office of the Associate Provost for International Programs (Stanley Major Projects and the National Resource Center), the Office of the Associate Provost for the Health Sciences, the College of Medicine, the College Public Health, the Department of Anthropology, and Students Against Sweatshops. Other co-sponsors included Doctors for Global Health, the Global Health Corps of the University of Northern Iowa, Global Lawyers and Physicians and the Health Law Department of the Boston University School of Public Health, Physicians for Human Rights, and The Stanley Foundation.
"Rubber Helmets: The Certain Pitfalls of Marshaling Security Council Resources to Combat AIDS in Africa"
Marcella David
Human Rights Quarterly, 2001
The article by UICHR Advisory Council member Marcella David explores the suggestion that the United Nations Security Council consider the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa as a threat to international peace and security. Arguing that prospects for constructive engagement in the Security Council are minimal to none and that there are more appropriate UN agencies to address the issue, David gives her “top ten reasons” why the Security Council is not the best forum to tackle the AIDS epidemic.
Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends
Diana Fritz Cates
University of Nortre Dame Press, 1997
UICHR Executive Board member Diana Fritz Cates argues in her book, Choosing to Feel, that it is possible and noble to understand our relationships to fellow human beings — even strangers and enemies — in light of a notion of "extended selfhood," so that we take the well being of others to be included in our own well being. The book offers a philosophical analysis of the virtue of compassion, which for many people undergirds the commitment to human rights.
"The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States"
Kenneth Cmiel
The Journal of American History, 1999
How are we to understand the seemingly ubiquitous references to human rights at the close of the 20th century? Most scholarship on human rights in the 1970s centers on the Carter administration. In this article, Kenneth Cmiel, former director of the UICHR, suggests that we instead look at the growth of nongovernmental organizations and pre-Carter legislation to explain why human rights politics persists to the present. The human rights activism of the 1970s is best understood less as a stage in the Cold War than as an emerging strand of late-twentieth-century globalization.
The Future of International Human Rights
Burns H. Weston and Stephen P. Marks
Transnational Publishers, 1999
This book, co-authored by UICHR Interim Director and Senior Scholar Burns Weston, analyzes and assesses emerging domains of international human rights law and practice, the development of which is part of the legacy of the Universal Declaration, and explores the viable pathways to the future that the Declaration opens up. Writes The Honorable Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: "Peering into the future of human rights law is akin to sizing up the promise and failings of the human soul. To understand the past and present of human rights can be a way of understanding what collectively we may become in the future, a profoundly important task to which this book is dedicated."
Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars
Christopher Merrill
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999
This book is a chronicle of poet, critic and UICHR Executive Board member Christopher Merrill's 10 war-time journeys to the Balkans from the years 1992 through 1996. At once a travelogue, a book of war reportage, and a biography of the imagination under siege, this personal narrative takes the reader along on the author's journeys to all the provinces and republics of the former Yugoslavia — Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina — as well as to Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey. Here is a literary meditation on war, a portrait of the poetry, the politics, and the people of the Balkans that will provide insight into the past, present, and future of those war-torn lands.
"Women and the United States Government"
Marcella David
Women And International Human Rights Law
Transnational Publishers, 1999
For in-depth coverage of gender issues in human rights law, from theory and cultural practices to legal instruments and the case law of international tribunals, this major three-volume work is without peer. More than 100 leading authorities in the field, including UICHR Advisory Council member Marcella David, offer trenchant analyses of problems and solutions, crimes and abuses, available recourses, areas of empowerment — the entire spectrum of women’s rights, discussed at a level of detail and legal awareness unavailable in any other single source.
The Best of Enemies: Race and Redemption in the New South
Osha Gray Davidson
Scribner, 1996
The inspirational true story of how C.P. Ellis, Exalted Cyclops of the Durham, N.C., Ku Klux Klan became friends with Ann Atwater, a militant black community organizer. UICHR Advisory Council member Osha Gray Davidson probes one of the most crucial concerns at the heart of our culture: how and why race is a potentially destructive force. The Best of Enemies weaves a rich history with an inspiring personal saga to depict the triumph of the human spirit over the tragic past. It was nominated for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the New York City Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award.
Broken Heartland: The Rise of America's Rural Ghetto
Osha Gray Davidson
University of Iowa Press, 1996
Between 1940 and the mid 1980s, farm production expenses in America's Heartland tripled, capital purchases quadrupled, interest payments jumped tenfold, profits fell by 10 percent, the number of farmers decreased by two-thirds, and nearly every farming community lost population, businesses, and economic stability. In Broken Heartland, UICHR Advisory Council member Osha Gray Davidson chronicles the decline of the Heartland and its transformation into a bitterly divided and isolated regional ghetto. Through interviews with more than 200 farmers, social workers, government officials, and scholars, he puts a human face on the farm crisis of the 1980s.
The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee
Christopher Merrill
Milkweed Editions, 1995
Merrill, a poet, critic and UICHR Executive Board member, has written a personal, moving account of the tragic repercussions of the conflict in Bosnia. The Old Bridge is based on Merrill's journeys through the area and his conversations with those on all sides of the conflict. Blending personal stories of ordinary lives torn apart by war with a passionate analysis of the international community's response and what it means for the coming "age of the refugee," Merrill's essay is an important introduction as well as a warning of the future of conflict at the end of the 20th century.