Economic Justice

2017 Mar 22

Study Group: Human Rights, Ethics and Philanthropy

4:00pm to 5:00pm

 

Carr Center Fellow Patricia Illingworth will lead a semester long study group, Human Rights, Ethics and Philanthropy.

About the Study Group

Given great global and domestic need, the moral imperative to help others is pressing and falls on the state, civil society, enterprises and individuals.   In recent years philanthropy – the “love of humanity” – has received...

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2017 Mar 06

*CANCELLED* Laughtivism: Fighting Authoritarian Regimes with the Power of Humor *CANCELLED*

4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Carr Center Conference Room R-219

*This event has been cancelled*

How do you start, build, and complete a peaceful revolution?  How do we fight oppression and violence? Why were the Serbian and Arab Spring revolutionaries able to topple deep-seated autocrats while the American Occupy movement failed to achieve its stated goals? What are the application of rules for 'people power' movements in different environments - from autocracies to democracies?

Join us on Monday, March 6th, as Srdja Popovic looks at how past youth movements have successfully toppled...

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PolicyCast - The Challenges Faced by Human Rights Organizations with Sushma Raman

December 21, 2016

While human history is replete with examples of repression and the struggle against it, it wasn’t until 1948 that the world came together to declare in one voice the sanctity of each individual’s dignity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a triumph of the post-war period, and while the world is by most measures a far better place today than in 1948, the declaration’s adoption was not the end of the fight for...

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Adding Human Rights Punch to the New Lex Mercatoria: The Impact of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights on Commercial Legal Practice
John Ruggie. 10/13/2015. “Adding Human Rights Punch to the New Lex Mercatoria: The Impact of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights on Commercial Legal Practice.” Journal of International Dispute Settlement, 6, 3, Pp. 455–461. See full text.Abstract
Adding Human Rights Punch to the New Lex Mercatoria: The Impact of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights on Commercial Legal Practice:

 

In July 2015, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, otherwise known as FIFA, announced that as a prominent part of its new reforms, it will ‘recognise the provisions of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (‘GPs’)1 and will make it compulsory for both contractual partners and those within the supply chain to comply with these provisions’.

Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia
Siddharth Kara. 5/6/2014. Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia, Pp. 336. New York: Columbia University Press. See full text.Abstract
This volume is Kara's second, explosive study of slavery, this time focusing on the deeply entrenched and wholly unjust system of bonded labor.

 

Siddharth Kara's first book, Sex Trafficking , has become a critical resource for its revelations into an unconscionable business, and its detailed analysis of the trade's immense economic benefits and human cost.

In his second volume, drawing on eleven years of research in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, Kara delves into an ancient and ever-evolving mode of slavery that ensnares roughly six out of every ten slaves in the world and generates profits that exceeded $17.6 billion in 2011. In addition to providing a thorough economic, historical, and legal overview of bonded labor, Kara travels to the far reaches of South Asia, from cyclone-wracked southwestern Bangladesh to the Thar desert on the India-Pakistan border, to uncover the brutish realities of such industries as hand-woven-carpet making, tea and rice farming, construction, brick manufacture, and frozen-shrimp production. He describes the violent enslavement of millions of impoverished men, women, and children who toil in the production of numerous products at minimal cost to the global market. He also follows supply chains directly to Western consumers, vividly connecting regional bonded labor practices to the appetites of the world. Kara's pioneering analysis encompasses human trafficking, child labor, and global security, and he concludes with specific initiatives to eliminate the system of bonded labor from South Asia once and for all.

Classroom technologies narrow education gap in developing countries

Classroom technologies narrow education gap in developing countries

September 16, 2016

Carr Center's Steven Livingston argues that classroom technology can narrow the education gap in his latest blog via the Brookings Institute.

"Well before the invention of laptops and the World Wide Web, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician, computer scientist, and education visionary Seymour Papert realized that connected electronic devices could improve the educational experience of students, even for those who face poverty and geographical...

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On Where We Differ: Sites Versus Grounds of Justice, and Some Other Reflections on Michael Blake’s Justice and Foreign Policy
Mathias Risse. 2/29/2016. “On Where We Differ: Sites Versus Grounds of Justice, and Some Other Reflections on Michael Blake’s Justice and Foreign Policy.” Law and Philosophy, 35, 3, Pp. 251-270. See full text.Abstract

Mathias Risse examines Michael Blake's Justice and Foreign Policy.

 

Blake’s book conveys a straightforward directive: the foreign policy of liberal states should be guided and constrained by the goal of helping other states to become liberal democracies as well.

This much is what we owe to people in other countries—this much but nothing more. The primary addressees are wealthier democracies, whose foreign policy ought to be guided by the idea of equality of all human beings. My approach in On Global Justice bears important similarities to Blake’s, but with those similarities also come equally important differences. The purpose of this piece is to bring out these similarities and differences and in the process articulate some objections to Blake.

HKS

Introducing Carr Center's 2016-2017 Fellows

August 25, 2016

The Carr Center is pleased to announce our Fellows for the upcoming academic year. Carr Center Fellowships offer scholars and practitioners the opportunity to spend a semester or year at Harvard conducting research, sharing experiences with students, and exploring critical human rights issues with a distinguished group of peers. Our fellows come with a range of experience as researchers, practitioners and leaders in the filed of human rights.

See more information on all of Carr Center's fellows for the 2016-2016 year...

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Three Images of Trade: On the Place of Trade in a Theory of Global Justice
Mathias Risse. 2014. “Three Images of Trade: On the Place of Trade in a Theory of Global Justice.” Moral Philosophy and Politics, 1, 2. See full text.Abstract
Economic theory teaches us that it is in every country’s own best interest to engage in trade.

 

Trade therefore is a voluntary activity among consenting parties. On this view, considerations of justice have little bearing on trade, and political philosophers concerned with matters of global justice should stay largely silent on trade. According to a very different view that has recently gained some prominence, international trade can only occur before the background of an existing international market reliance practice that is shaped by states. On this view, trade is a shared activity among states, and all participating states have in principle equal claims to the gains from trade. Trade then becomes a central topic for political philosophers concerned with global justice. The authors find fault with both of those views and argue instead for a third view about the role of a trade in a theory of global justice. That view gives pride of place to a (non- Marxian) notion of exploitation, which is developed here in some detail.

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