Author: Breanna Silva

by Pamela Neumann

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Abstract

The killing and abuse of women remains one of the most serious problems confronting Latin American societies. Many countries have passed a variety of laws intended to address femicide and other forms of violence against women. Yet the implementation of these laws has been inconsistent at best. This article analyzes the case of Nicaragua, which passed a comprehensive law on gender-based violence (Law 779) in 2012. While celebrated by local women’s organizations, Law 779 was subsequently weakened through a series of legislative reforms and executive decrees. This article seeks to explain why state actors in Nicaragua initially supported Law 779 and later sought to undermine it. Despite the development of transnational governance structures over the last two decades, this article demonstrates how local political conditions remain central to explaining the trajectory of gender-violence legislation, particularly in contexts characterized by a high concentration of political power. Through an analysis of Law 779, this article contributes to broader debates about the nature of state legitimacy and the potential of legal advocacy to address violence against women.

Keywords: gender, violence against women, gender-based violence, Latin America, women’s rights, transnational feminism, state legitimacy

About the author:

Pamela Neumann earned her M.A. in Latin American Studies and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include gender-based violence, social movements, and development in Latin America. Her current book project examines the politics of gender violence law and women’s everyday experiences with the legal justice system in Nicaragua. Her work has been published in Gender & Society, Social Problems, and Social Forces.

by Rimple Mehta

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Read a response here.

Abstract

The trajectory of violence in the lives of women engaging in transborder mobility can be plotted along a continuum where the border becomes one moment and site of violence in a series of violent experiences. Being masculinised and militarised the border becomes the breeding ground for gender–based violence. In this context, the paper discusses the experiences of violence in the lives of Bangladeshi women in Correctional Homes in Kolkata. Their narratives suggest that perpetrators and sites of violence change but the Indo-Bangladesh border remains central to their experiences of violence. This paper focuses on the violence experienced by these women before crossing the border, while crossing the border to come to India, during their stay in India and while returning to Bangladesh; coupled with emotions of fear, anxiety and shame. Their experiences of violence need to be seen in the context of their non-normative ways of being – their challenge to the norms instituted for women by the family, state and society. Their so–called deviations from normative modes of behaviour put them in situations of extreme vulnerability.

Keywords: gender-based violence, border studies, mobility

About the author:

Dr. Rimple Mehta is an Assistant Professor at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, India. She has studied Sociology, Social Work and Women’s Studies and has written on gender, borders, sexuality and prisons. Her paper titled “So Many Ways to Love You/Self: Negotiating Love in a Prison” won the 2013 Enloe Award and was published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics. She has also been associated with organisations and networks working against violence on women and has worked on cases of women affected by domestic violence.

by Craig Lauchner

Publication forthcoming in the Texas International Law Journal

Abstract:

Access to quality education has improved significantly throughout Latin America over the past three decades as a result of substantial investment in education at the national level. One driver of that investment has been Mercosur’s robot coordination within its member states, underscored by a strong commitment to the human right to education. While efforts to improve educational opportunity have contributed to a marked decline in the level of income inequality in the region, overall economic inequality has stagnated. Initiatives aimed at combating inequality through the promotion and protection of the human right to education—specifically those of Mercosur’s Educational Sector (SEM)—may have the unintended consequence of perpetuating already existing educational inequalities and, by extension, economic inequality among and within the block’s member states. Rather than leveling the economic playing field, investment in education in some cases appears to be subsidizing the rich while offering no more than a basic floor of protection against gross violations of the human right to education.

Resumen:

En las últimas tres décadas, el acceso a la educación de calidad en América Latina ha crecido significativamente como resultado de una inversión sustantiva en educación por parte de los gobiernos nacionales. Un impulso para ello fue la coordinación entre Estados del Mercosur sumado a un fuerte compromiso con el derecho humano a la educación. Mientras que los esfuerzos por mejorar las oportunidades educativas contribuyeron a disminuir los niveles de desigualdad económica, lo cierto, es que la desigualdad general permanece. Así, los incentivos dirigidos a combatir la desigualdad a través de la promoción y la protección del derecho humano a la educación- especialmente los provenientes del Sector Educativo del Mercosur (PASEM)- en una de esas han generado consecuencias indeseadas como ser, perpetuar las desigualdades educativas existentes, y por extensión, las desigualdades económicas entre y al interior de los miembros del bloque. En vez de nivelar el campo de juego, la inversión en educación, en algunos casos, parece subsidiar a los ricos mientras que solo ofrece un piso mínimo de protección contra groseras violaciones del derecho humano a la educación.

by Ryan Jones

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Abstract:

The six nations that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—have found themselves severely criticized for the abhorrent conditions that migrant workers frequently face in these countries. One common target of criticism is the kafala system, used to regulate migrant workers in the Persian Gulf and neighboring Arab states. The kafala system requires foreign workers to obtain a sponsor—typically the migrant’s employer—and receive permission before leaving or changing jobs. Many critics argue that the power kafala gives to employers fosters human rights abuses, including nonpayment of wages, inhumane living conditions, human trafficking, as well as physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. As a result, these critics have called for the repeal of kafala as well as a push for additional labor law reform and stricter enforcement. However, as evidenced by Bahrain’s unsuccessful efforts to curtail abuse by dismantling kafala through outreach and labor law reform, merely removing the traditional pillars of kafala is insufficient. This paper examines the method of “root cause analysis” employed by many NGOs and activist groups, drawing on Susan Marks’ critique of such thinking. I argue that attention to legal conditions is insufficient, and that abuses in the GCC are unlikely to significantly subside until gross economic inequality between labor source nations and the GCC is reduced. I also consider an argument made by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl suggesting that the most effective way to combat economic inequality between countries is to encourage migration as it exists in the GCC—by drawing extremely high numbers of a country’s workforce from some of the world’s poorest nations.

Keywords: Kafala, migrant workers, Bahrain, economic inequality, root cause analysis

Resumen:

Las seis naciones que comprenden el Consejo de Cooperación para los Estados Arábes del Golfo (CCG)- Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Arabia Saudita y los Emiratos Arabes Unidos- han recibido importantes críticas por las aborrecibles condiciones de trabajo que enfrentan los trabajadores migrantes en esos países. Una crítica frecuente es al sistema kafala, sistema utilizado para regular a los trabajores migrantes en el Golfo Pérsico y los países arábes de la zona. El sistema kafala exige que un trabajador extranjero obtenga un auspicio -típicamente por parte del empleador del migrante- y deba obtener permiso antes de dejar o cambiar un trabajo. Mucho críticos argumentan que el poder que el sistema kafala le otorga a los empleadores fomenta violaciones a los derechos humanos, que pueden incluir el no pago del salario, condiciones de habitabilidad inhumanas, trata de personas, como también abusos físicos, sexuales y psicológicos. Como resultado de estos, los críticos sostienten que debe terminarse el sistema kafala y adicionalmente debe producirse una reforma en la legislación laboral que también debe ser aplicada de forma más estricta. Sin embargo, Bahrain fracasó al intentar terminar con los abusos tan solo desmentalando el Kakala y produciendo algunas reformas laborales, lo que muestra que tan solo remover los pilares del sistema kafala no es suficiente. Este artículo examina el método “análisis de las raíces de una problema” que utilizan muchas ONGs y activistas siguiendo las críticas de Susan Marks. Argumento que poner atención tan solo a las conficiones legales es insuficiente, y que los abusos en el CCG no van parar hasta tanto las groseras inequidades entre las naciones que ofrecen los trabajos y el CCG se reduzcan. Asimismo, considero un argumento de Eric Posner y Glen Wey, estos autores sugieren que la forma más efectiva de combatir la desigualdad económica entre los países es alentar la migración tal cual existe en el CCG, es decir, mediante la extracción de un número extremadamente alto de la fuerza de trabajo para un país de algunas de las naciones más pobres del mundo.

About the author:

Ryan Jones is a JD student at the University of Texas School of Law.

by Carla Silva-Muhammad

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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 suggest that by denouncing injustice and human rights violations through self-documentation and use of global indigenous media, protests, and political alliances, this indigenous group is not only claiming reparations from the Brazilian government, but also reshaping the language of human rights. Moreover, this essay explores how the Kayapo communities engage in activism pertaining to the construction of the Belo Monte Dam, developing an international political identity in order to guarantee their right to self-determination and survival.

Keywords: indigenous peoples, self-determination, collective rights, global indigenous media

by Dorothy Estrada-Tanck

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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 which the two concepts can mutually reinforce each other has rarely been assessed. Thus, this paper looks more closely at the UN conception of human security in relation specifically to violence against women. It reflects critically on how a gendered human security would have to be shaped and studies its connection with human rights, covering the UN and regional normative landscapes and reviewing paradigmatic cases by the Inter-American and European Courts of Human Rights as exemplifying some of the potentials of the human security-human rights symbiosis. The concept of violence against women, strongly developed by international human rights law, has seldom been contemplated explicitly in human security concerns of violence. This text then examines the consequences of applying a human security lens to the legal analysis of violence against women and their human rights, and of including the human rights definition of violence against women within the human security sphere. In doing so, it spells out the added value of this dialogue and brings to light the synergies between human security and the human rights of women experiencing structural vulnerability in everyday life.

Keywords: women’s rights; violence against women; human security

by Aziz Rana

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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 simply to place limits on it. This unacknowledged security origin of today’s constitutional climate speaks to a profound ambiguity in the type of public culture ultimately promoted by the Constitution. Scholars are clearly right to note that constitutional loyalty has created political space for arguments more respectful of civil rights and civil liberties, making the very worst excesses of the past less likely. But at the same time, public discussion around protecting the Constitution – and with it a distinctively American way of life – has also served as a key justification for strengthening the government’s security infrastructure over the long run.

Rana argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, significant popular skepticism actually existed concerning the basic legitimacy of the Constitution. But against the backdrop of World War I and the Russian Revolution, a combination of corporate, legal, and military elites initiated a concerted campaign to establish constitutional support as the paramount prerequisite of loyal citizenship. Crucially, such elites viewed the entrenchment of constitutional commitment as fundamentally a national security imperative; they called for dramatically and permanently extending the reach of the federal government’s coercive apparatus. In the process, defenders of the Constitution reproduced many of the practices we most associate with extremism and wartime xenophobia: imposed deference and ideological uniformity, appeals to exceptionalism and cultural particularity, militarism, and political repression. Moreover, the problem with such World War I origins for today’s constitutional climate is not simply that of a troubling but distant past. Rather, the foundations developed nearly a century ago continue to intertwine constitutional attachment with the prerogatives of the national security state in ways that often go unnoticed – emphasizing the real difficulties of separating the liberal and illiberal dimensions of American constitutional culture.

Keywords: constitutionalism; national security state; American constitutional culture

Revised version published as “Constitutionalism and the Foundations of the Security State,” California Law Review Vol. 103, (2015), p 335. View here