Welcome
Dedicated to interdisciplinary and critical dialogue on human rights, the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series (WPS) publishes innovative papers by established and early-career researchers as well as practitioners. The goal is to provide a productive environment for debate about human rights among academics, policymakers, activists, practitioners, and the public.
Authors from all disciplines and institutions are welcome to submit papers. We publish papers on a variety of human rights and social justice topics, and we particularly welcome papers focusing on issues and topics affecting the Global South. We are especially interested in the following: reproductive justice and sexual rights; environmental justice and climate justice; peace and nuclear disarmament; inequality; and the future of work.
Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis and evaluated by the WPS interdisciplinary editorial committee, which includes graduate and professional students from across the University of Texas. The WPS committee provides comments and feedback to authors before the paper is published online. Publication in the WPS does not preclude future publication elsewhere; in fact, many of our working papers have since been published in academic journals and edited volumes.
Each year, the WPS publishes the winning paper from the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights and the Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice.
Our Latest Posts:
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Violence Committed by Americans against (Foreign) Americans
by Dr. Barbara Harlow 10 DEC 2015 Mark Danner’s portrayal of the muted denunciation of human rights abuses during the now more than decade-long U.S.-led global “War on Terror” and the remission of the once honorable paradigm of the exposure of injustice leading to redress were especially poignant reminders of the current crisis in humanitarian thought
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What Do We Do With What We Know? The War on Terror and Human Rights
by Natalie Davidson 9 DEC 2015 We at the Rapoport Center were privileged last month to hear journalist Mark Danner talk about human rights and the War on Terror at the inaugural Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecture in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights, titled “Spiraling Down: Human Rights, Endless War.” Danner offered an
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Girl Branded: Nike, the UN and the Construction of the Entrepreneurial Adolescent Girl Subject
This post is one of our Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship in Gender and Human Rights, Working Papers .by Maria Hengeveld View/download paper Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2015) Abstract: With the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and philanthro-capitalism since the early 2000s, transnational corporations (TNCs) have come to play a prominent role in international policy debates on sustainable development and human rights. A key feature of
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Eliciting Self-determination: The Kayapo Mobilization Through Activism and Global Indigenous Media
by Carla Silva-Muhammad View/download paper Abstract: Exactly how do indigenous actors elicit the right of self-determination as inherited, and to what extent does such agency reconstitute or validate human rights norms? This essay proposes that within their unique project of self-representation and activism, the Kayapo indigenous society is indeed reformulating the concept of self-determination. I
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Nike’s Girl Effect and the Privatization of Feminism
by Megan Tobias Neely 21 NOV 2015 This commentary is a response to Maria Hengeveld’s paper, “Girl Branded: Nike, the UN and the Construction of the Entrepreneurial Adolescent Girl Subject.” In 2009, Nike launched the Girl Effect, a “brand-led movement” targeting the alleviation of poverty among girls worldwide. The initiative advocates for investing in adolescent girls to create
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The Human Right to Education and Economic Inequality
by Samantha Chammings 19 NOV 2015 Craig Lauchner’s working paper was written as part of the Fall 2015 law school class and Rapoport Center Colloquium on Inequality and Human Rights. The Colloquium brought together scholars, academics, practitioners, and students from the UT Law School and LBJ School of Public Policy to ask the question: can
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Beyond Purely Legal or Economic Analyses of Migrant Laborer Abuses
by Safa Peera 15 NOV 2015 Ryan Jones’ paper, “Beyond Kafala: Remedying Human Rights Abuses of Migrant Workers in the Persian Gulf,” examines the kafala system in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. The kafala is a system of laws and customs used to
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Bureaucratic Activism and Colombian Community Mothers: The Daily Construction of the Rule of Law
This post is one of our Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship in Gender and Human Rights, Working Papers .by Lina Buchely View/download paper Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2014) Abstract: Whereas mainstream literature affirms that the rule of law is an abstract concept that comes from democracy and liberal institutional systems, people in the local Global South do not experience this certainty. In some ways, the rule of
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Human Security and Women’s Human Rights: Reinforcing Protection in the Context of Violence Against Women
by Dorothy Estrada-Tanck View/download paper Abstract: Considering the human security approach to critical risks and vulnerabilities, this paper explores violence against women as one of the most pervasive and widespread threats worldwide. While there is a general understanding that the human security analysis and the human rights legal framework intersect, so far the ways in
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Constitutionalism and the Foundations of the Security State
by Aziz Rana View/download paper Abstract: Scholars often argue that the culture of American constitutionalism provides an important constraint on aggressive national security practices. This article challenges the conventional account by highlighting instead how modern constitutional reverence emerged in tandem with the national security state, functioning critically to reinforce and legitimate government power rather than
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