Around the world there are a myriad of NGOs using human rights education (HRE) as a tool of community empowerment with the firm belief that it will help people improve their lives. One way of understanding these processes is that they translate universal human rights speak using messages and symbols which make them relevant to people’s daily lives and culturally resonant. However, an alternative more radical perspective is that these processes should engage individuals in modes of critical inquiry into the ways that that existing power structures maintain the status quo and control not only how we understand and speak about social inequality and injustice, but also act on it.
Peacebuilding in the African Union: Law, Philosophy and Practice
Particularly in the context of internal conflicts, international law is frequently unable to create and sustain frameworks for peace in Africa. In Peacebuilding in the African Union, Abou Jeng explores the factors which have prevented such steps forward in the interaction between the international legal order and postcolonial Africa. In the first work of its kind, Jeng considers whether these limitations necessitate recasting the existing conceptual structure and whether the Constitutive Act of the African Union provides exactly this opportunity through its integrated peace and security framework.
Cyber-Attacks and the Exploitable Imperfections of International Law reveals elements of existing jus ad bellum and jus in bello regimes that are unable to accommodate the threats posed by cyber-attacks. It maps out legal gaps, deficiencies, and uncertainties, which international actors may seek to exploit to their political benefit.
The book is a critical, genealogical analysis of land questions in the South through an original analysis of the Malawi experience. Through the author’s experience in land reform and subsequent advanced research in the area, the book notes that land reform discourse is dominated by an ethos based on market as value which, in turn, has cemented the ubiquity of a universal, automatic transition from land reform to land law reform in tackling a land question in a country.
A fresh theory on how individuals respond to inequalities occurring within their own communities. This original and insightful study draws on empirical research on the Santal people of Asia, examining power relations within social fields, and the state, to reveal a typology of power practices, and applies these to forced marriage in the West.
